The Gardener Pauses (4 April 2021)
Copyrighted © by Roy J. Beckemeyer*

We creep down the ramp, me backwards, gripping her walker from the front to regulate her progress, her facing me; the pain and anxiety and somewhat hesitant determination that dominate her features these days vanish momentarily when she looks up to see me watching her and manages a quicksilver smile. On both sides the rich jungle of shades of green scumble, stab, sweep, and flourish in a jumble of shapes and gestures, providing a setting for gemstones of buds and blossoms, arrayed along the railing as if they await her appraisal.

The gardener 

comes to resemble 
her plantings, 

earth-intimate 
as if she herself 
has taken root. 

All this is the result of her long, fine work, decades of nurturing seedlings, sifting loam and mulch, moving transplants, her artist’s eyes envisioning this plant set better in that far corner, on her knees or bent over or sitting sidesaddle on a rock, reaching, always reaching and gaging and critiquing, conjuring order out of this chaos, stirring a bit of chaos into that order, continually achieving the exquisite that we mere observers cherish as extraordinary, but can scarcely imagine how it could have been made to happen. She still sees with that vision, sees all that might yet be, finds it hard to be content with what everyone passing sees as inordinate beauty, what she sees as a bit tarnished and neglected, what she wishes she might still be able to dote upon and burnish to brilliance if she could shed some of the years, somehow regain even a modicum of the strength and health and stamina of those days.

The garden tilth 
builds each 
growing season; 

now nearly knee-deep, 
it burdens her body, 

replenishes her soul. 

We pause for a moment beneath trailing branches of viburnum, adrift in the rich, almost decadent perfume it exudes, and she closes her eyes, her face hovering there, and inhales, and I hold my breath, anticipating this: a transcendence that makes her features glow, that transforms her once again, for one translucent and transient moment, into the woman, the Gardener, who created all this because she needed to, and wished to, and could, and did.

She finds, 

beneath floral scents, 
a counterpoint: 

the redolence of fertile soil—
a base note, an aromatic anchor, 
a touchstone. 

*The Gardener Pauses is an iPhone photograph of the late Patricia Beckemeyer (1942–2024); taken and copyrighted on 4 April 2021 by Roy Beckemeyer, her husband of 62 years.

—Awarded Second Place in MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #2

Roy J. Beckemeyer’s

poetry collections include The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023) and Mouth Brimming Over (Blue Cedar Press, 2019). Stage Whispers (Meadowlark Books, 2018) won the 2019 Nelson Poetry Book Award. Amanuensis Angel (Spartan Press, 2018) comprises ekphrastic poems inspired by modern artists’ depictions of angels. His first book, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, 2014), was a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. With Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, he co-edited Kansas Time+Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry (Little Balkans Press, 2017). His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (2015, 2020, and 2024) and for Best of the Net (2018), and was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019.

A retired engineer and scientific journal editor, Beckemeyer is also a nature photographer who, in his spare time, researches the mechanics of insect flight and the Paleozoic insect fauna of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Alabama. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, where he and his wife celebrated their 62nd anniversary in November 2023.

Please visit author’s website for more information about his books, as well as links to selected works, and to interviews and readings (scroll down his About page for the latter link-list).

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Megarhyssa, ekphrastic poem by Beckemeyer in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 14, August 2022), nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ The Color of Blessings in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 5, October 2020), nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart

⚡ Featured Artist in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019); showcasing Beckemeyer’s poetry, prose poetry, and insect photography

⚡ Words for Snow, a prose poem in KYSO Flash (Issue 9, Spring 2018), which was selected for reprinting in The Best Small Fictions 2019