Silent Foxglove Bells

Sitting in the garden.  My wife has put a load of time into making our front yard look like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden.”  I couldn’t name most of these things beyond the roses and the foxglove.  That last word spins my mind off to something I read backpacking in England.  I think I had a book of Shelley’s poetry with me.  Did he have something to say about foxglove?  I search for the reference and search again.  Was it Byron?  I’m just about to give up when I see the name Keats.  And indeed, he referenced the flower in his poem about solitude:

Sonnet VII. To Solitude

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,

Let it not be among the jumbled heap

Of murky buildings: climb with me the steep,—

Nature's observatory—whence the dell,

In flowery slopes, its river's crystal swell,

May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep

'Mongst boughs pavilioned, where the deer's swift leap

Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.

But though I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee,

Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,

Whose words are images of thoughts refined,

Is my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be

Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,

When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

My wife feels it’s a waste to have all these blue and pink and red petals falling to the ground.  She’s got a few dozen pressed now into a magazine.  “This is how we’ll spend our retirement” she utters nonchalantly.  “I’m leaving.” Says my little one.  “Why?” Demands my wife.  As if she didn’t know the answer.  “You’re boring.”  She needs an escort back passed the “wild” bees that Keats noticed, who are indeed humming about in the silent foxglove bells.

Very nice early seventies Ron Carter album on: “Blues Farm.”  He’s always so stately.  I was biking home from a Starbucks meeting a few hours back and “A Quick One” came on.  I biked as fast as I could in unison with The Who, until my heart pounded and my bike chain popped off.  Now my hands are covered in grease.   I washed them but it doesn’t matter.  The soap I used wasn’t effective. This is good grease.

I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than three minutes in the front yard of this rental, beneath the pine tree’s “boughs pavilioned.”  It’s hard to believe this was dust storm, sewer of a terrarium a mere forty-eight hours ago.   I salute my wife’s gardening, which has made it a place to which we two both can flee, if only or forty minutes or so.  

Sunday, 5/07/16