Line 998:  Some neighbor’s gardener

Some neighbor’s!  The poet had seen my gardener many times, and this vagueness I can only assign to his desire (noticeable elsewhere in his handling of names, etc.) to give a certain poetical patina, the bloom of remoteness, to familiar figures and things—although it is just possible he might have mistaken him in the broken light for a stranger working for a stranger.  This gifted gardener I discovered by chance one idle spring day when I was slowly wending my way home after a maddening and embarrassing experience at the college indoor swimming pool.  He stood at the top of a green ladder attending to the sick branch of a grateful tree in one of the most famous avenues in Appalachia.  His red flannel shirt lay on the grass.  We conversed, a little shyly, he above, I below.  I was pleasantly surprised at his being able to refer all his patients to their proper habitats.  It was spring, and we were alone in that admirable colonnade of trees which visitors from England have photographed from end to end.  I can enumerate her only a few kinds of those trees:  Jove’s stout oak and two others:  the thunder-cloven from Britain, the knotty-entrailed from a Mediterranean island; a weather-fending line (now lime), a phoenix (now date palm), a pine and a cedar (Cedrus), all insular; a Venetian sycamore tree Acer); two willows, the green, likewise from Venice, the hoar-leaved from Denmark; a midsummer mulberry, its shade inviting to tarry; and a clown’s sad cypress form Illyria.

He had worked for two years as a male nurse in a hospital for Negroes in Maryland.  He was hard up.  He wanted to study landscaping, botany and French (“to read in the original Baudelaire and Dumas”).  I promised him some financial assistance.  He stared to work at my place the very next day.  He was awfully nice and pathetic, and all that, but a little too talkative and completely impotent which I found discouraging.  Otherwise he was a strong strapping fellow, and I hugely enjoyed the aesthetic pleasure of watching him buoyantly struggle with earth and turf or delicately manipulate bulbs, or lay out the flagged path which may or may not be a nice surprise for my landlord, when he safely returns from England (where I hope no bloodthirsty maniacs are stalking him!).  How I long to have him (my gardener, not my landlord) wear a great big turban, and shalwars, and an ankle bracelet.  I would certainly have him attired according to the old romanticist notion of a Moorish prince, had I been a northern king—or rather had I still been a king (exile becomes a bad habit).  You will chide me, my modest man, for writing so much about you in this note, but I feel I must pay you this tribute.  After all, you saved my life.  You and I were the last people who saw John Shade alive, and you admitted afterwards to a strange premonition which made you interrupt your work as you noticed us from the shrubbery walking toward the porch where stood—(Superstitiously I cannot write out the odd dark word you employed.)