Then
I am sorry for climbing the gray branches
of the bent fig, and for slamming the screen
door with the spring too heavy for my hands
on my way in or out to the green slatted bench,
its white cement sides stamped into the earth,
where we sat with our grape or orange sodas
in white spiraled wire planted into the ground
where you pulled a few weeds or patted dirt
around seedlings while we watched my father
climb up with spiked shoes and a rope
to saw limbs that needed pruned, or waited
for the boys to finish tilling a new patch
for the garden of tomatoes and string beans tied
to posts, radishes and peppers, three or four kinds,
where bees circle camellias whose scent was so wild
that I am sneezing even now and my eyes water
because I am so sorry I will cry thinking about
bringing salt out to the hot cherry tomatoes
we pulled straight off the vine and also of
the dark ivy that grew up to the first branches
around the front yard’s crab apple that ultimately failed
and that now, like all the rest, is good and gone.
Laura Lee Washburn, Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University, is the author of This Good Warm Place (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Cavalier Literary Couture, Carolina Quarterly, 9th Letter, The Sun, Red Rock Review, and Valparaiso Review.