Your color was the color of diamonds: gray and white and whatever else. I am beginning to think that this isn't such a good idea. Like when? Like when you said things would be good again and you looked into my eyes, your forehead clear and white like china, and you said the reason we cannot love is to be found in our eyes. I stared at your eyes for so long then.





Topiary gardening isn't as easy as it looks. I should know: I do it for a living. I know you think, "Well, all they have to do is just cut the bushes and trees into the shapes they want." This is partially true, but think about it from my perspective. Have you ever tried to cut a hedge? Have you ever tried to cut a straight line out of a hedge, much less shape an elephant or a giraffe? It is infuriating.


When I started, all I could do was the hedge maze, for hours and hours, trying to get the hedges just trimmed back to where they had started. A snip here with the nippers, a grunting reach up to the arboreal heights with the loppers, and of course moving the ladder around in the wee hours of the morning so that it doesn't affect the daily rounds of children with ice cream cones and mouths full of screaming and laughter and ice cream, hands tearing and jostling my beautiful hedge maze.




Mr. Warstone, he was my boss for this period of time. "Head Gardener" read the brass nameplate over his locker in the cabana. "Ours is a simple task," he would begin to the rounds of new recruits - turnover was like you wouldn't believe - "to keep the hedges and topiary sculpture trimmed, groomed, and in decent foliage year-round at Winter World/Summer Land theme park. We are Winter World in the winter, when all the topiary will be covered in snow. Mostly it's just a matter of raking leaves and protecting the plants from any damage incurred by youths armed with candy canes and sleds. I guess you can figure out when we operate as Summer Land.




"Spring and fall, however, are really our peak seasons, as they are for all gardeners, farmers, and people who live off the land. In summer it is too hot to plant anything, and since we don't grow fruit, there's nothing falling off the vine to collect. In winter it is too cold to plant anything, and very few plants bear anything worth collecting in the winter. In spring, however, plants are in full growth, and the topiary sculptures beging to sprout all manner of unsightly ingrown shoots." At this point he would point to his nose. "Do you trim your nostril hair?" The unbearded grounds crew, mostly high school and college students, would usually laugh and imagine what it would be like to have copious amounts of nostril hair, or a nose like Mr. Warstone's, as big as a pluot, in which to cultivate it all. "Well, one day you will. Until that day," and at this point he would gesture out to the grounds, "you can practice on our sculptures."




"Fall is a different matter altogether. We must replant and regroup." Mr. Warstone would point at the seemingly disrepaired and unused shovels huddling in the corner of the cabana next to the folded mackintoshes and galoshes in an array of cubbies with pieces of tape over each square cubicle marked with names like "Graney" and "Shep." "Those shovels will be of some use to us then. Your backs should be strong enough to shift some earth. We will braid the new plants into the existing foliage, always thicker." Mr. Warstone's eyes would begin to stare off at some far-off Platonic ideal of topiary foliage, through which no light nor child's arm would ever pass, a hedge that would cleave like butter, at right angles. Then he'd take us outside, to the mammoth.




The mammoth was his pride and joy. It was a woolly mammoth topiary sculpture, about life-size, roughly the size of a two-story cottage. He would ask us if anyone thought they could sufficiently trim the mammoth, with a base hedge of juniper and ivy draped over it for the woolly part. He reserved the trimming of this sculpture into late June - most of the trimming took place in May - in order to prove a point. Invariably, some young lad who had been on last year and thought he had mastered the shears would raise his hand. Mr. Warstone would set the young man up on the side facing the cabana, away from the side facing the entrance, and let him at it.




In less than five minutes, Mr. Warstone would be tearing into a screaming fit. "You're ruining my mammoth! What is the matter with you?" Without fail he would with tears in his eyes run at the mammoth with clippers in hand and in a few short minutes would stand back, look forlornly at the mammoth, to all eyes but his exactly the same as it had looked ten minutes earlier, and sigh, "Well, I think I may have saved it." Then he would turn toward the crew and give us a disappointed scowl. "But I think I had rather die than let any of you near my mammoth again." He would assign us to more menial tasks - trimming, raking up excess clippings, mowing the lawns, watering, and so forth - and go to work perfecting his mammoth. He could spend hours on the juniper tusks jutting toward the sunlight, and one wondered how a man with so much patience at his craft could fly into a rage at his staff of high school students.



Summer wore on and some boys would quit, unable or unwilling to bear the spate of verbal abuse that was sure to accompany any run-in with Mr. Warstone. Any task, no matter what stage of completion or how well or poorly it was done, went without some comment. "Don't cut so much. No wonder Bambi's mother was shot; you amputated her," he would sneer at a boy trimming the leg of a deer. "Do I have to drown you before you understand how much to water the ficas fox?" It went on and on. Warstone was not an especially happy man.



I remember the day Robbie Childs ran up to the cabana to awaken Mr. Warstone from his daily siesta. Robbie was the smallest among us, probably only about 139 pounds, a junior in high school, barely able to lug a shovel around, much less do any good with it. He knocked on the door. From beyond the portal came a groan, "What?"



"It's two-thirty, sir, like you said." Robbie listened at the door and looked at the windows to check for any signs of life. Mr. Warstone was known for throwing a shoe at the door to frighten the offending party off with the loud noise, but the other shoe did not drop today. "Wake up, sir."

Like a light pours from an open window into the street, unguarded and unbarred. A womb, art, this garden where I lay unfulred looking across the abyss of flowers and sky. Each stem is a tiny world where light and the fuzzy glare of afternoon plays on the ends of petals. There is a perfection in these weak moments, a satisfied grunt of grass smells and the sticky tangibility of grass touching my arms' skin.