backed up against a neighborhood nature park—

that plot of land indemnified

per the ordinance of the city’s new incorporation;

a field sluiced by a creek whose banks

are riprapped in a silt fence made of

coirs that catch the people’s trash:

Gatorade bottles, rusty trikes, a mangled traffic cone

catapulted from the toll-way above the ravine;

the tollway your brain stopped listening to

through the barbed “acoustic attenuation wall" (AAW)

that dampens the sound.

There in suburbia

is a dead-end street that leads to the community’s middle school,

a school flanked by non-attendants of the school,

whose homes were built for the private class.

Nevertheless, the school is important to mention because

the pre, peri, and post-pubescent children “ooh” and “aah”

at the spectacle of what they see in suburbia.

‍Unfortunately,

those children are immured in wheels

of their mobile yellow cage.

The closest their affection can come

comes through throwing their prized possessions

with adoration as offerings to the gods.

The diesel rumbles by, windows down, and

the broadside battery unleashes its salvo:

fifty children arms dangling, fluttering, and firing

an enfilade of pencil toppers, rice-crispy wrappers,

and once I found a keychain.

‍This house, this long ranch house, double-storied ranch house,

was once defined as a compound. The proportions of the windows are wrong:

small, non-symmetrical.

The home’s facade is mostly plaster

of mustard beige with unbecoming stonework

that it wears like poorly fitted shin guards.

The word ugly comes to mind.

‍The yard is easily fifty yards from the street,

if a yard is the correct description.

Residential forest is more apt. Then, one day,

now distant in memory,

a feller head attached to a caterpillar harvested

the whole lot till there was nothing

but stumps, sawdust, and slash.

The entire earth before the home was blighted

by the to-and-fro of near-constant daily labor:

skidders and forwarders, skidding and forwarding

so that all the soil was upheaved and scarred

by the tracks and batteries of heavy machinery.

The only recognizable bit were the stumps,

like dog tags collected from a corpse.

That was until the stump grinders made do with that, too.

‍Months would pass,

and walkers-by like myself would wonder why

the forest was put to death for no reason but an uglier yard.

Then, one day, off to the left of this gangly estate,

came an outline of a pebble path, defined with plastic edging.

Then stones, then mulch, and aside it all was a shovel

staked in the ground as if marking conquered land;

beside it, a hose, offering itself like the serpent of life.

‍Day-by-day, week-by-week, noticeable progress,

but noticeable like watching a video with dropped frames,

a timelapse without a subject; the yard improved itself

without sight of its keeper who seemingly worked

in that queer hour of 10:15 AM when even homemakers

were gone away on errands.

‍We still weren’t sure what it was

till the gateless gate erected itself as

a Japanese Torrii:

the keeper had made for himself a Zen Garden.

Many would call it ugly,

but as its expanse has expanded to envelop the whole left yard,

I have come to visit this Shinto shrine,

awaiting its progress with the same anticipatory glee

as throngs who await the marginal developments in the news cycle,

in the day-time dramas, and on whatever is served

by the algorithm’s latest trend.

What many may still see as ugly,

I now see as beauty.

The vermillion red is

the beacon of my nightly walk,

set nowadays to the croaking

of summertime creek frogs and

the pulsing bursts of lightning bugs.

‍A Japanese maple grows out from the garden.

From the sand rake have been made concentric waves

around a rock like Mount Meru that grounds me

from my day’s worries and duties.

Knowing not the keeper of this place,

I have found, in myself, a keepsake.

‍Somewhere in this world that makes no sense

has erected, spontaneously, a site of Zen.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit substack.qntns.com