“My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow…”
(To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell)
Garden catalogues invaded our bed, and my husband was aroused…but not in the way I had hoped.
When he pulled the adhesive mailing label from a catalogue off his pajamas one morning, I knew there were problems in paradise. In order to keep the peace in the bedroom, I had to keep the catalogues out.
But that didn’t stop me from dreaming big. Each night my dreams brought forth the garden of my desires: expansive enough to hold every plant I coveted, verdant and pest-free.
Every morning I faced reality. I was a big dreamer with a small yard. The botanical booty of my dreams exceeded my space by a lot, actually two lots.
Then a voice commanded: “Woman, go vertical.”
That’s when I added vines to my catalogue order: the clingers, the grabbers and the twiners.
Willingly I sowed the Passion Flower vine. But in my inexperience, I failed to provide a support for this clinger and found my Passion Flower in an indelicate pose — flat out and face down.
Lovingly, I cultivated the grabbers too. Boston Ivy and Virginia Creeper’s disk-like suction cups grabbed the garage; Hydrangea and Trumpet Vine’s root hairs hugged our house. When I decided to break off my liaison and relocate these grabbers, the remnants of their ardor remained — vine hickeys covered our stucco house.
Shamelessly, I scattered seeds of Hyacinth Bean below our second-story bedroom window, erected a trellis and forgot them. Before the end of last summer, this twiner forced its way through a dime-size hole in the screen. My husband complained that while the catalogues were out of the bedroom, now the vine was in.
“You know,” I said, “some people believe love and life began in the garden.”
“It ended there too,” he noted.
But gradually, among the catalogues and the vertical catastrophes, our diurnal and nocturnal life has returned to a convivial coexistence.
Yesterday, though, when two new catalogues arrived, my husband got testy. As long as he keeps it out of the bedroom, testy I can take.
Listen: To His Coy Mistress
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44688