The Garden Terrace

Lyrics

Up from the second floor. The air changes here.
Past the cedar-ghost of the Linen Closet, the dust motes dancing in the Hallway Window Seat.
Up the last flight, the narrow one.

The Attic Landing. A stillness made of paper and dry wood.
To the left, the Letter Room, ajar, breathing its scent of faded ink and promises.
I keep my eyes from the door opposite, the Taxidermy Room.
That is a preservation without peace. A stillness I cannot catalog.
I am not going there today. I am going up.

And the sky opens.
Not the wide, frightening sky. A square of it, framed by brick.
Sun-warmed stone under my feet. The low parapet wall.
This is my index. My grid.
Here, things grow only where they are told.

On the Garden Terrace, the terracotta pots are in their lines.
A hundred years of soil, turned and tended. My hands remember the hands before me.
This is the order above the order.
The little house that floats above the big house.
Each pot a promise kept against the coming winter.

The rosemary bush is from 1953, its trunk thick as a wrist.
This empty one held the climbing rose that the black frost of 1971 turned to paper.
The soil remembers its roots, I know it does.
The little zinc labels, my handwriting sharp over the ghost of another’s.
Thyme. Basil. Mint. Sage.
A litany of what can be saved.

And the smell of the thyme, when I brush its leaves...
It is not a scent. It is the feeling of small, grey river stones, cool and smooth in my palm.
It took me so long to see the pattern.
The pots are not in rows. They are a map.
This wild, unruly mint is the Master Bedroom. The lavender, placid and sleeping, is the Nursery.
The basil, here in the center, is the kitchen garden, a tiny echo of the one below that's long gone to grass.

On the Garden Terrace, the terracotta pots are in their lines.
A hundred years of soil, turned and tended. My hands remember the hands before me.
This is the order that explains the order.
The little house that floats above the big house.
Each pot a promise kept against the coming winter.

The sun is warm on the back of my neck.
I give water to the Son's Room, where only parsley grows.
It is enough. It is contained.
The catalog is complete for today.