Garden Keeper

He is reading the palm of my tree’s stump
And I wonder who was it that let him
in through my front gate

I dodder between the sway of bougainvillea
A cobblestone has dislodged itself from the walkway
A cloud overhead is shaped like a swollen kidney
And some puffs of cotton candy have alighted there
onto a fretful daisy, from the nearby carnival

I am lumbering here to my trespasser
Who has now been stammering his feet
And is shuffling his lips into something, well,
Of a hair snarled in a set-to-high blow dryer

And suddenly my nose is formed of that dislodged cobblestone
And that swollen kidney up beyond shrivels into an ear
And that daisy’s disconcertion is suddenly my own

As I have tumbled into an old man – as a flower bed
And he is kicking at my bees
And I am knotting myself around the loop of his tie