 Photo credit: R.H.W. Dillard |
jeanne larsen
Jeanne Larsen’s first book, James Cook in Search of Terra Incognita, won the AWP annual award series in poetry. She subsequently published two collections of translations (Brocade River Poems & Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women’s Poems from Tang China), as well as three novels (Silk Road, Bronze Mirror, & Manchu Palaces). A new novel, Sally Paradiso, is out in e-format from Brown Fedora Books. Her poetry, fiction, & essays have appeared in many journals, & she has received grants & awards from the NEA, the Japan/US Friendship Commission, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, & others. Most of the time, Jeanne Larsen lives in southwest Virginia’s Roanoke Valley, just west of the Blue Ridge. She is currently Susan Gager Jackson Professor of Creative Writing in the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University.
"Paradise Garden" finds its way to Ad Hominem from Jeanne's latest collection, Why We Make Gardens, available to purchase now! Order your copy of Why We Make Gardens. Read blurbs about Why We Make Gardens. |
Paradise Garden
What grew there before
its arrangement? We know this—within it, one apple tree blooms beside an oasis where flowers rise radiant from water, cradling morning thrones. Or maybe it offers ripe fruit & pods that float up, holding savory seeds. So. We don’t even know: April or autumn? Could it have both, bees burrowing while on some simultaneous branch the tart red globes hang? Impossible! Apples round & they drop. Or else sheathed buds unfold in that cloister. Dream tells us this much: in the Persian enclosure, those forfeited pleasure grounds, that serene lotus basin, in the groomed bride of earth—in the garden of paradise, if time there is mastered, as it must be, then some moment from all must be chosen. Is it this one? This? |
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