I remember you like this

Your back bent over the garden
as you laid mottled stones in a row:
a highway for slugs or rain-slick
homes for shining black beetles

shovel and rake leaned by the wall
handles crossed like dear old friends
companions in the long winter
months of dusty shed hibernation

and the pansies, reseeded from last year
quite by accident, purple and white faces
shamelessly gazing skyward until you
carefully loosed them from the soil

with expert hands and a rusty trowel
and laid them in loose bundles
on the grass, roots down, tops up: in stasis
as you dig them a new corner row

Rachel Westfall
May 22, 2011