My daddy was a gardener
His basil got taller than me.
Everything smelled like pizza as shaggy bunches dried.

I grew up on the front porch snapping green beans
He carried over in five-gallon buckets.
I remember tasting summer all winter long,

Little yellow broccoli buds when he gently parted swirls of leaves
With the same huge hands that pulled down dying trees
And turned them into firewood to keep us warm.

One year, our tiny peach tree suddenly woke up.
As if blessed that spring by Demeter,
We had an armload of fruit where we had barely had any.

Dad was so happy, he decided to make jelly.
But jelly simmers slowly for so long that he fell asleep.
From too many peaches, we ate none.

Growing so close its branches banged
On the slate roof every thunderstorm, we had an apple tree
So overgrown the bitter fruit splashed to the ground.

On quiet mornings, with fog hanging in a thick blanket,
Deer would wander out of the woods to eat their fill.
Dad would take his coffee outside and join them

Crouched low against the stone wall he built,
Just a few feet away, contemplating the fog, and the garden,
And the pond nestled in the hills surrounded by redbud trees.

My daddy was a gardener
And his mom and dad before him, too,
But his magic has skipped me.

Nothing grows from the spot
Where we planted him in the ground
A copy of my son’s sonogram picture in his casket.

At almost ten, he finds his hiding cousins and chases them around the cars
A respectful distance away. Too like Dad to be contained,
His long fingers can never quite stay clean.

But there is no scent of wild basil,
No sign of a propagated green bean vine reaching up from the dirt,
And the last strands of funeral ivy are withering on my windowsill.