Derek Otsuji

Garden Tools

These were the tools of her art and trade—

The yard gloves, the hedge trimmer and the rake.

The garden hose unwound, like a brown snake,

Sunning in the innocent grass. The spade,
The weeding sickle whose rust-crusted blade

Bears evidence that she did not forsake
Her small plot once her bones began to ache

But continued into her last decade.
Landscape rocks record the weather and wear

—quiet chronicles of lichen and moss—

Like the doorpost that registers the year
and each child’s height, until they left the house.

And because all the restless searching they’d do
She made a garden—for them to get back to.

Lost

The shop lady, in a blue suit, noticed me
from behind a brightly lit case of liquid gold perfumes,
three holly berries with their pointy green leaves pinned on her lapel.

“Where’s your Mommy?” she asked.
As if I was the one who had lost her.

What I remember next was being taken up the elevator
to an upper room.

A woman there brought me crayons, a coloring book.
Which I accepted politely, hiding my annoyance
that there were not dinosaurs
on the cover.

But I opened the book
to some indifferent picture and started coloring.

Holiday music was being piped into the store when the song
I’d been tracking in my mind (I was too abashed to hum)—stopped
and my name, announced over the PA.

It sounded like a dropped coin, rolling then clanging once, before falling
through the grate of a storm drain.

I colored furiously for what seemed a very long time,
a jungle of green roiling over thick black lines,
when my mother appeared.

The look on her face—

love’s embarrassed apology.

Outside it was already dark.
The trunk was loaded with presents,
for cousins, other people, these things.

My mother was saying something that I couldn’t quite hear.
But I remember feeling that her voice was a tether, binding me to the earth.
Cut loose, I would drift upward forever
It took a great act of will to stay,
to keep both eyes on my feet hovering just above the car floor
and not look up with strange longing into the cold and the night
and the orphaned
stars.