Glass in the Garden
Max Heinegg
– Denver Botanic
There’s a baby rabbit under the lilacs
and a family chatting beneath bamboo.
Old women in bright colors photograph
one another in the steel door frames
of airy gazebos, and in a casual pond,
fusiform koi gather open-mouthed,
mottled white, warm orange, sleepy blue.
Hedgerows and bonsai are sculpted
by volunteers dipping waist-deep to touch
waterlilies, buds. All of this balance is
achieved by attention, constraint. Even
the city’s knockout heat can be risen from
in a shaded corner where fauna ends and
Chihuly’s Colorado begins, a glass sunset
and a glass of sunset. A fountain in the mouth
of a fountain whose colors equal rooted
incarnations of banyan, verbena, ponderosa pine.
Brash sunlight keeps our eyes on the ground.
In a season the garden will devour itself
and regenerate, but once this fragile fire goes,
it’s gone, in less than a season to the sky.
Max Heinegg’s first book, Good Harbor, won the inaugural Paul Nemser Prize from Lily Poetry Press. His work has appeared in 32 Poems, Thrush, Nimrod, The Cortland Review, and The Night Heron Barks, among others.