Joshua Coben

Green’s Garden
 
My grizzled neighbor when I was a child 
tended a backyard plot of vegetables 
and flowers. John Green, well suited to his name,  
nurtured the verdant and perennial. 

He worked the ground behind his formerly rural, 
now suburban house, weeding the beds 
that poured confusion over the rickety slats 
and chicken wire that kept his yard from ours. 

Compact and sturdy as a tuber, he crouched 
in the dirt or stood, hunching, his head gray-stubbled 
and sparsely sown, his loose work-trousers cinched 
low at the waist, hands caked with earth, lips 

preternaturally moist with spittle 
when he spoke of his crops or told us childhood stories.   
Once, he claimed, he and his friends had played 
with matches in a farmer’s field; the blaze 

had cleared the land on which our houses stood. 
He and his elderly sister had lived together 
all their lives in the home their father built, 
three floors of brick and timber furred with ivy. 

Their mulberry tree, whose fruit purpled our driveway,  
filled the metal bowls we brought in summer. 
We neighborhood kids would sit out on his porch   
as he read aloud from Little Golden Books, 

Peter Rabbit, The Little Engine That Could. 
Some of the same kids pranked him at Halloween:   
When he answered the door, they stuffed his mouth with Reese’s 
peanut butter cups because they knew 

he hated peanut butter. Still, he helped 
my older sister turn a patch of dirt 
behind our garage into a flower garden.  
The summer before I started college, not long 

before he died, my parents said he’d asked 
to see me. By then too frail to work his land,  
he’d started on a secret indoor project. 
His sister, Elizabeth, blue-eyed, white-haired, 

genteel and delicate — who after his death 
stepped out with a gentleman caller — answered my knock.  
I’d rarely entered that moldering, dark house,  
its shutters always closed, and when I had, 

I’d never left the kitchen. Now I climbed   
to the highest story, a bare and dusty attic 
with only a chair, a table, a phonograph. 
He waved me in to see his great new work:  

listening over and over to soundtrack albums 
of classic musicals, catching the words 
to Showboat and Carousel, transcribing lyrics 
with a shaky schoolboy’s hand on legal pads.  

He meant it as his legacy, this service  
to a different kind of culture. He was as proud 
to fill this need as if he’d cracked the code 
to cuneiform or dug up Mayan gold. 	

Who was I to tell him that these lyrics 
were found in musical scores and liner notes?    
While weeds erased the traces of his labor, 
new purpose fructified his final months  

with tasks to last beyond the trillium 
and beans no longer budding in his yard.  
He put a record on. The needle bobbed
along the neat black furrows, and music bloomed.

Joshua Coben is the author of two poetry collections, Maker of Shadows (Texas Review Press, 2010), winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Night Chaser (David Robert Books, 2020), a finalist for the Vassar Miller Prize, the New American Poetry Prize, and the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Able Muse, Atlanta Review, The Cincinnati Review, College English, Narrative, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, Salamander, and Verse Daily.