The Rosemary

By August,

the tomatoes have already split open from too much rain.

*

Meanwhile,

February hardens the rosemary beside the fence,

silver frost hugging the leaves

with the airless meticulousness of old handwriting.

*

The garden holds every season in balance,

active simultaneously.

*

Beneath the plum tree,

a woman kneels in the fresh spring mud,

holding seeds in her palm

like unauthorized futures.

*

Three feet away,

a tornado arrives early,

dragging sections of fence through the air

while wind chimes chatter to each other

like tiny courtroom bells.

*

Somewhere behind her,

October burns quietly through a pile of dead basil.

The smoke smells faintly medicinal.

Like ancient kitchens and wet soil,

A damp sweater carried indoors after dusk.

*

A child version of the woman wanders through it freely,

touching lavender not yet planted,

stepping around floodwater from years ahead,

and searching the grass for sacred geometry

she has not buried yet.

*

At midnight,

summer cicadas vibrate against darkness

with the intensity of raw electrical wires.

By morning,

ice solidifies itself across the surface of the birdbath.

*

The garden accepts these contradictions gracefully.

Only humans demand chronology from living things.

*

Near the back gate,

sunflowers lean heavily into any patchwork July,

while December crows gather on bare branches overhead,

their silhouettes distributed like damaged punctuation.

*

An elderly woman appears briefly near the tomato cages.

She smells of cedar drawers and vanilla cold cream.

*

“You spent years believing survival meant remaining alert,”

she says,

cutting dead stems from plants still flowering in another decade.

Then she vanishes behind a solid wall of pink hollyhocks.

*

Rain falls backward.

Water rises from the roots into the clouds.

Somewhere,

a future argument moves through an open kitchen window.

And somewhere else,

someone laughs beside a fire pit that has not been assembled yet.

*

Collapsed fence, fresh mulch, squirrel-bitten shingles.

First strawberries, abandoned gloves.

Candles glowing during power outages,

moths colliding gently with porch lights.

Even the empty spaces remain occupied.

Especially the empty spaces.

*

At dusk,

the woman stands beside the network of overgrown pathways

watching fog gather low against the ground

like memory reconsidering.

*

Her hands smell of rosemary,

soil,

and something older than either.

Behind her,

spring continues blooming quietly behind the wreckage.