Minnesota Poetry: Leslie Adrienne Miller's "The Dead Send Their Gardener"

Posted at 11:15 AM on March 15, 2010 by Marianne Combs (1 Comments)
Filed under: Minnesota Poets, Poetry

Leslie Adrienne Miller has published several books of poetry, including "Eat Quite Everything You See" and "The Resurrection Trade." A professor of English at the University of St. Thomas, Miller combines old world imagery and academia with modern day sensibilities and earthly desires. Her poem "The Dead Send Their Gardener" struck me in particular because of the contrast between the extremely "alive" gardener, and the ghostly presence of the couple whose roses he tends.

The Dead Send Their Gardener

He arrives in the courtyard with two cartons
of juice, each of which he'll tip and drain
at one go in the heat, and a sack of food
for the roses. He looms over his tools,
blond and dusty as a stalk of ripe wheat,
surely someone's prized lover. Centuries
bask among his hybrid teas, and he shakes
his capable handfuls of food into their beds
until nothing but roses nose the blues between lake
and garden, lake and sky, the lapse of lawn
where a party could be if those who lived here once
returned to pour the wine. She'd be the sort
to tuck a bud behind her ear, and he to catch
one in his teeth. But alas we're guests
of the present, expectant and sultry; all
graciousness is fled, and rain fills the spent
blooms, tumbles their tops, weighted with ruffles
and shocks of pink. The gardener too disappears
with his breeches the color of mustard and cinched
with a string, gone back into the pages of Hardy
or Lawrence. Perhaps, he'll appear again Tuesday next,
but he won't look any of us living in the eye.

- "The Dead Send Their Gardener" by Leslie Adrienne Miller, as it appears in The Resurrection Trade. Reprinted here with permission from the publisher, Graywolf Press.