American Life in Poetry
I like the looks of trellises and arbors and those miniature barns that keep your bushel baskets of tools dry. Here’s a poem by Frank Osen, who lives in Pasadena, California, about a garden shelter that’s returning to the earth.
The Lath House
Wood strips, cross-purposed into lattice, made
this nursery of interstices—a place
that softened, then admitted, sun with shade,
baffled the wind and rain, broke open space.
It’s now more skeletal, a ghostly room
the garden seemed to grow, in disrepair,
long empty and well past its final bloom.
Less lumbered, though, it cultivates the air
by shedding cedar slats for open sky.
As if, designed to never seem quite finished,
it had a choice to seal and stultify
or take its weather straight and undiminished,
grow larger but be less precisely here,
break with its elements, and disappear.