Invasions
Gardening tip: Avoid invasive exotics and use plants native to your region.
July, and heaven help my garden.
For years I let it have its way.
Now neighbors’ faces pinch and harden
while my nonnatives range and stray:
the maple, its promiscuous seeding
whelming their diligent hand-weeding;
tawny daylilies shouldering past
our shared fence. But what limit lasts
in nature? Forms ideal as Plato’s
yield to the creeping-charlie’s creep.
Grapevines come for us in our sleep.
Raspberries infiltrate tomatoes,
front-line troops on a tireless quest.
I’ve failed the eco-friendly test,
but I’ve got reasons. Resolution
wilts to recall how flowers I tried
uttered their florid elocution
once—maybe twice—and promptly died:
peonies, poppies, coreopsis,
the dismal yearly thanatopsis
of hardly hardy hybrid teas.
(The money blown away on these!)
Only the stolid lived, whose forces
muscled through frost-heaved winter kill.
What stuck it out against wind chill—
surviving on its own resources,
poking fresh suckers up at sun—
was the right stuff. I let it run.
It ran. And now a stiff abrasive
tsk-ing chafes against the less-
than-ornamental, stealth-invasive
fruits of my laissez-faire largesse.
I made my plans; the plants finessed them.
Lounging, I watch the sprinkler bless them,
spattering with its bright jeux d’eau
their greenly generous overflow.
I, a descendant of invaders,
hold with admixture, change, and chance
and smile at what the randy dance
of wind wafts in. Forgive me, neighbors.
Plans are a froth, a bagatelle.
Things might be different once I sell.