GARDEN OF IVY
(for Hilary)
Ivy has taken over our lives;
A new house and an overworld of green;
Clinging—like thick, grubby, bark-skinned cobwebs—
To old pipes, walls, and the ‘rag-and-bone shop’
Of someone else’s dead life. It seems sly;
Entangling itself throughout the rotten,
Wooden skeleton of a large glasshouse;
It covers an old mangle heavily—
Like a bamboo-woven mat. The dead, brown
Tentacles are brittle as baby bones:
They biscuit-snap. Above, white flowers snow
And a dirty shower of big, green moths.
The limbs of disorder? Or nature
Left to ooze its joy? It grasps the high walls
Like provocative art: a seaman’s rope
Snaking on the dry surface of cement.
It has branches as thick as a man’s wrist;
I hack, with an axe, into this jungle
Of garden shame; I saw its brown tendrils,
Revealing a gaping, tattered whiteness.
I am its sweating slave; its dust peppers
My salted face. My slicing and tugging
Release the ruined, rusty riches;
Captured under its green revolution.
But someone else must have loved it; needed
This waterless aquarium of weeds.
Copyright © Adel Gorgy 2011 Photograph Olives and Ivy after Van Gogh (The Olive Garden)
for Peter Thabit Jones (Garden of Ivy)
Cross-Cultural Communications Art & Poetry Series Broadsides # 18
