And when you traveled you visited gardens, glasshouses, arboretums, mazes of rhododendron, rose mazes in the mountains, cacti and snake plants along ochre dirt roads, you stood in the Cambridge Botanic Garden beneath a clone of Newton’s apple tree. Left your husband with the child in the stroller and went head deep into prairie grasses, lingered in misted rooms of orchids that had sewn themselves to trunks and limbs, Mediterranean herb gardens on your early morning walk alone you beat your hands through to rouse the aroma—the gardener who crushed the myrtle and rubbed his fingers beneath your nose, Middle East desert oases, a spring where you sunk into the mica-flecked water, naked and hidden among the green-spiked saharonim, espaliered pears on a garden brick wall, the lambs and kids out to English pasture, and the solitude the decapitated monarchy once walked, sycamore lanes along a pond of swans, and sat on the iron bench in Marie Antoinette’s secret garden, and stopped the car to wander gravel paths through bees roving in lavender, and boxwood and yew hedge, and the frangipani ringed in red geraniums in the Bahá’í Gardens, the hillside of overgrown stinging nettles you forced yourself through to stay on the wilderness trail, you paid to enter the whimsy of topiary birds and crouching cats, and in your own home, you grew orange begonias in pots against the bedroom window’s security bars, because they were easy, reliable bloomers, petite, beautiful faces erupting with no need or expression of a single emotion.

Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from Glance: Poems, by Chanda Feldman. Copyright © 2024 by Louisiana State University Press.