A Poem by Maryann Corbett

An Enclosed Garden

(Golden Shovel on three lines from Robert Frost)

I know I’ve seen it before
on my daily walks and wanderings, and I
search it out now, the high stone wall facing the quiet alley. Lilac-draped, built
of rough-cut granite, odd among pickets and chainlinks, it enacts a hortus conclusus—a
medieval metaphor for the untouchable, the set-apart. A wall
with a locked gate: an utter closure. So Old-World-Charming I’d
not quite grasped the coldness of its refusal.
You might ask:
what sort of neighborhood is this, where people want to
wall themselves in, clutching their hoarded uprightness? And I know
how it looks: the awful roar of Nextdoor: the who/where/what
of the latest porch-nabbed packages, the latest plundering of catalytic converters. I
know how we rage together, map where last night’s break-in was,
bluster about the mayor’s stone-walling.

But we do see: see what we’re complicit in.
We put brave faces on, filling front-yard gardens or
window boxes with summer color. Prodigals, we give beauty away, not walling
off our dahlias, our zinnias, our marigolds, not fencing anyone out
from our vaunted neighborliness. And
all the while, the sleeping bags under the bridge and the tent city next to
the freeway bark their rebuke:
Whom
will you welcome, of these unhoused, rough-sleeping, laundryless? What I
have attempted—washing bedding, providing a meal, offering a handout—was
not in the remotest sense acceptance, was nothing vaguely like
welcome. Was, in sober fact, equivalent to
                                   this wall that wraps a garden in stony exclusion, determined to give
nothing away. Refusing the world, in beautiful and brute offense.

Maryann Corbett is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The O in the Air from Franciscan University Press. Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, is included in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry 2018, and is featured on the websites of American Life in Poetry and the Poetry Foundation.