June 9, part one: between... (12 minutes)

...the rows, the little ditches thrive with weeds and grasses -- some kind of monkey grass, some of that annoying St. Augustine -- and there I am on my knees, pebbles crushing into them, sore, coarse, the sun pounding down on my back, my naked neck, my bald head.

It's somewhere between 9:30 and noon, somewhere between breakfast and lunch, a coffee mug sits on the coffee table on the front porch, a few gnats hovering around the remains of cream and coffee drying, coagulating in the bottom. Sitting there I was thinking "I need to do some weeding, get the garden back in order, let the flowers and the vegetables have a little more space, show them I appreciate their effort, make an effort to do so," and the next think I know I'm in the middle of it.

I crawled out of bed to pee an hour before I was ready and went back to bed, lay between the sheets, no cover, that was kicked off in the middle of the night as the humidity rose, the barometric pressure fell, or whatever it does to find its way into my sinuses and throb. The space between my eyes pulls at the top of my mouth and the insides of my nostrils, the back of my throat feels constricted. I lie there naked between the sheets, the ceiling fan making them ripple, the box fan pointing out of the window pulling the breeze over me. No a/c. I don't want to turn it on. My house is situated between bamboo and pecan trees, a veritable forest of green; breezes blow throughout the summer. The hotter it gets, the greener the plant life gets, the taller it grows, the more shade, the better the breeze.

I had wanted to get on the computer, do a little writing, finish that poem. But it's no use. I can't read between the lines, I can't fill in the blanks. If I don't let it all flow at once, the drain goes dry. I know what I wanted to say, but I'll never go back to it. Maybe I'm a lazy poet.

A day when the sun waited for rain,
A day when there was nothing but pain--

No, that wasn't it.

And so I made my coffee, went to the porch, watched the grackles steal dog food kibbles from the neighbor's porch. I could have slept an hour longer. Now I find myself pulling grasses, pulling stubborn little vines that look pretty but turn monstrous, take over everything, climb the sunflower stalks, nine feet high, and choke them like in a horror movie.

I have small pile of already withering weeds piling up between the rows in the garden.