It’s not the woods

It’s not the woods, then;

it’s a lawn, planted like

a carpet, a boundary fenced,

designed to mark and define,

not to keep it. It’s a garden,

bordered in flowers, dead leaves,

earthworms, bees clinging

to the Monarda. No wildness

like then, no place to pretend,

It is what I know now.

It is what I fit, now.

Photograph: Shaw’s Arboretum, Gray Summit, Missouri.