I’d been looking forward to this week not because of what’s happening but because of what’s not happening. Our Grand Opening is over, I have no performances for the rest of the month, just little chores to do, no major projects. Anyway, that’s how I looked at the future on Sunday morning, before I began to work in our parkway flower garden.
Reality always diverges from expectations. In four hours I managed to do what I thought I’d finish in one. Earlier this month, I’d planted half the plot; now all I had to do was mulch around the remaining edges, rake up the weeds, sprinkle seeds, and then I could work in our vegetable garden with our friend Doug, who’s sharing the work and the harvest, if there is one. But the yarrow held fast against my rake, the violets formed an unwanted carpet, the wild rose bushes remained rooted, dandelions had already gifted their spores to the whole neighborhood, and not even these intruders could compete with the main bane of my flower patch: bindweed. I raked back and forth, back and forth, tugged and loosened plants, piled them on newspaper along the edges, and mentally wrote an Ode to bindweed.
No not an ode.
Nothing is owed
To bindweed.
Nothing is owed
I wish that I’d hoed
When this viny foe
Appeared years ago
Seeming benign and so
Beautiful in its wild morning glory.
I wish I had hoed
Nipped it in the bud
Kept instead the dandelion
And pulled up every sign
Of the wicked weeds that bind.
This is not an ode, nothing is owed, should all be hoed.
For bindweed is nature’s version of the multi-national
Totally irresponsible, totally irrational
It strangles its competitors, wraps its tendrils round and round,
Spreads from plant to plant, both above and under ground.
It kills and propagates. Why is it so rapacious?
It takes over everything in a world created spacious.
Have you ever seen an area completely overrun? You will if you ride the Metro-North train from Manhattan to Tarrytown. The wild morning glory has co-opted one section of the vegetation that abuts the railroad bed, has created skeleton trees whose only leaves are morning glory leaves.
My poem has a ways to go, and so do I. Lots of bindweed sneers at me in my swatch of parkway.
