“Garden at Arles,” oil on canvas, by Vincent van Gogh, 1888.
The yard looks still.
Winds riffle green-coin
leaves, slim white-preened bark.
Sage blooms rust and scratch, each purple nodule
slow-dulled, at last breaking in breeze
to settle in a riverstone crevice, a single space
indented in mulch.
Pale roses wilt in their own fetid heat,
petal-life consumed in water and damp.
Ridges curl, brown-strafed.
Roots mottle and twist below, an endless
lurching and creeping through undersoil.
Ants hustle through flagstone
fissures, scream a frenzied silence.
Harvest is hell. A spin to thicken before fall.
Spikes of green fronding into an afternoon,
a horned cloud above bursting with the violence of spill.
Amie Sharp lives in Colorado Springs, where she is an assistant professor of English at Pikes Peak Community College. She was the featured poet for the July 2013 issue of Atticus Review and has been published or has poems forthcoming in Forge, Bellevue Literary Review, Pisgah Review, The 2River View, The New Formalist, The Penwood Review, and Aquarium by the Ocean.
