Garden Story

Once there must have been
a way of living without noticing the gap.

The story says a garden—
trees, light, a river going nowhere in particular.
A man walking through it
naming animals
as if words didn’t change anything.

Everything belonging to everything else.
That’s the idea.

Then the mind turned up.

Not with thunder or curses.
Just the small cold pleasure
of standing back
and looking.

The fruit tasted sweet enough.
Still, after it
the air felt sharper.

The hand paused before touching.
The eye began measuring.

And suddenly the world
was something to think about.

The garden didn’t vanish.
It simply lost its ease.
Like a field after harvest
when the stubble shows.

Time carried on like that—
work, weather, the usual trouble.
People sweating over the ground
as if something important
had slipped out of reach.

Yet the earth went on
growing things.

Then another story appears.

A woman crying outside a tomb
mistakes someone for the gardener.

Which, oddly enough,
might be the right word.

Not the old garden again—
nothing so simple.

But someone standing there
as if death itself
had turned out to be soil.

Not cancelling what happened.
Not putting the world back.

Just beginning something
in the same damaged ground.

The stone moved aside.
The body gone.
Morning behaving
as though it meant business.

And if that means anything
it isn’t a return.

More like seeds
working quietly under the dirt
until one day
something unfamiliar appears.

So perhaps the garden wasn’t lost
so much as changed.

Though changed into what
no one really knows.

Meanwhile we carry on—
planting, burying, waiting.

And sometimes thinking
that whatever grows next

won’t look much
like the first attempt.