Here What I Say

You know you lurk. Pray come to the surface like worms after a driving rain. Like the way I watched their long bodies shrivel on hot sidewalks as a child. 

Jim Morrison once said, “Trading your hours for a handful of dimes.” 

I sell time. That’s what it means to start a plant from seed. To take cuttings. To let these take root. I sell convenience. I sell hope. 

I used to think that those who sold anything had sold their souls. I now know that this is just another manifestation of the judge, a saboteur who wants to hide deep in the recesses of the cave for fear of being chased by his own shadow.

I wonder if Plato ever grew tomatoes. 

Maybe he grew olive from seed. Maybe you would say, “Pit”.

Perhaps he took bat shit before there was make up and made Sisyphus load wheelbarrows of this and push the fine fertilizer up the mountainside.

My love says, “Here what I say.” When I first heard this, I thought she was saying, “This is important. Hear me!” She was trying to tell me what she thinks. Like, Here’s what I think. I like the ambiguity of this. I like the ambiguity of words. I actually prefer HEAR what I say, and I’d like you to know, dear lurker, that life is a lot more interesting when you construct your own meaning.

You might drive along 56th Street in Des Moines, Iowa, and know the glory of yard after yard filled with dandelions and purple nettle flowers. And you might know the way the colors complement one another. You might wonder if the sun knows opposites. You might even know that there is no such thing as an opposite, only other links of a chain.

I did not come today to write of dandelions or colors. I came to stress what I have learned about the work put in on the front end. I came to explain why I spent a hundred and seventeen dollars on ____ eugenia seeds. 

You see there is a need for somebody who might predict the future, who knows that the unbuilt greenhouse will someday be a host to hundreds of tropical plants that will find their beginning on what was once a lot filled with needles and beer cans. You will know that in order to spread wealth we must believe that we are wealthy.

For much too long I have blocked myself. I never sold my soul. I sold myself short. I didn’t want to put in the work on the front end. I wanted what I wanted here and now. Like a child reaching for a spoon from a parent who can’t get over the control it takes to feign an airplane. 

A seed taught me everything. A seed taught me the necessity of listening. The way that not everything survives. The way that without sadness we will never know joy. 

You never knew Neight, the boy whose lifeless body lay in the doorway of the corner across the street from the lot where the greenhouse will be. You never saw the way they mopped up the blood, the way the place smelled like pine sol, the way they went back to selling cans wrapped in paper bags and blunt wraps in plastic packs.

You know what it feels like to stand on a spot and be divided. 

I can never forget the eye of the woman who told me she saw something she shouldn’t have seen and that’s why they did this to her. Dead. Grey. Hanging. A bulge where she once saw the world. 

One part of me walks with having known what that corner used to be like. Another knows of possibility, of the sweet taste of a loquat, of how nobody on that corner knows the name of this fruit. They say misbelieve. I never met anybody who didn’t like misbelieves. I think it’s like eating nostalgia. I think it’s like the pear tree on the lot where the greenhouse will be. I think it’s like the way people told me they was cooking pears and how there was a lady who would make pies.

Did you know a hurricane named Ida? Did you know she blew down that pear tree a couple years ago?

Now you do. And now you know the future, so many different varieties of eugenia growing under a greenhouse on France Street, in New Orleans, each seed a memory, each seed an unknown truth.