Darling (I come to you in the garden still wearing my robe)

by Seth Hagen

Annie Spratt

Darling,

I come to you in the garden still wearing my robe. I see your ring like a lucky toss on the cap of our concrete gnome. You peer into a clod but will not say what you see. I will not ask. Shadows lie around us, unraked leaves. At night in our sheets, I tap the air with my tongue but cannot taste what is there in the insomnia that leads you away. I do not ask. More and more, when you come back, I smell the river where I swam naked as a child. Once we were so stricken with the dream of each other, mornings came on like a sickness. In your convalescence, it rained robins and worms. In mine, flies visited the metal screen. No doctors, but there was time. We did not need to speak. We found other sounds squalling inside us, field recordings of second languages on the bus, cries pealing from playground slides, orchestras warming up. How easy to mistake for dissonance an art over our heads. Darling, it pleases me that you surrender your rough diamonds before working the earth. That tenderness needed to draw the sound.

---

Seth Hagen lives in Atlanta and teaches English. His work has been featured in Verse Daily and appears or is forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Willow Springs, DIAGRAM, gone lawn, LIT Magazine, and unbroken, among other journals.