Michael Simms
The Rock Garden
After my father died
I remembered the rock garden
we built years ago
in the backyard. I was fourteen.
From the backs of trucks
poured tons of gray gabbro,
black andesite, turbidite
forged with ancient animal faces,
pocked pumice, starry porphyry,
obsidian like the night sky,
pebbly granite, creased tuff,
flat gray basalt, bauxite,
marlstone, feldspar,
pyrite, flint, graphite, and iron slag
heavy as an ancient obsession.
Backs and arms burning
we stacked the rock in a ring,
filled it with soil, another ring,
another wall of rock
we O'Slaviens called
a fairy fort to hold our garden.
Each rock was solid as a fact
but fragile. I dropped a slab of granite
on a round black stone
and it cracked like an egg
with red crystal surrounding white crystal
surrounding a hole waiting a million years
for my mind to tumble in. I traveled far
in that moment until my father yelled
Start digging! The roses have arrived!
Each concentric layer of our hill fort
held a world of its own. First the native grasses
lantana and muhly grass, then the monkey grass,
the heat-loving salvia, star flowers
and the trumpet-shaped flowers
of hope named Esperanza,
beautyberry, yellow bells, and above them
yaupon holly, red yucca, purple passionflower,
blue daze, fragrant plumeria, hearty zinnia and azalea,
and finally, crowning the garden,
three crape myrtles with black foliage
and scarlet blossoms.
And decades later, as my family gathered
beside the Llano River in high summer
beneath red oak and yellow cedar
in the music of warblers and chickadees
I remembered the rock garden, far away
in miles and years. My brother stood
on the shelf of pink and blue limestone
and poured the ashes of our parents
into the river that plunges over
marble falls and granite shoals
and empties everything we've ever held
into the sea.