The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: We Know Each Other By Our Wounds by Jude Marr

---

Horticulture As a Cure for Loneliness

planted a maple in a pot (fired-clay, turquoise-glazed): the maple
pushed out
leaves (brilliant, vermilion): I watered, I watched—

then, just as vermilion brilliance peaked, my maple began
to grieve: leaves like spiders—small, brown
spiders, dead
in dusty corners—spider-leaves, desiccated
										fell

stoic maple, naked now, a geometry of leaflessness: you can’t
bend your branches: you can’t
							hide your nakedness: your root-ball
							(confined inside clay)
			can’t unfurl—

were you lonely, your dark roots entombed in turquoise?

but if I had set you free, let your roots
tunnel under my high, whitewashed wall, what conditional
conversations
could you have had, so far
from a maple forest?

should I have watered you more?

---