March 10, 2020

weighing my options at the Raulston Arboretum

When the doctor calls, I am somewhere between the cyclamen and Japanese maples.
Below, mulchy beds skewered with slips of white plastic tell me, in Latin, 
what I’m looking at. None of it makes sense. I bend toward a single branch of jasmine, 
inhale. The paths are circuitous. They lead nowhere and everywhere. An earlier rain 
has ebbed. In the silence, I can hear my own urgency. I think of the clippings 
transplanted thousands of miles from home. Look how they’re thriving! I say to myself.
It is a reassurance more than a nod to good science. I want time to pass quickly.
I want time to cease existing as a measure of anything other than a seedling, finding
its rhythms in North Carolina soil. I lift my head. It is heavier than yesterday.
Inches away, a bee is landing on the prize. I am so close, but I do not get stung.