“The Tattoo Garden
of Capella”
By Michael H. Brownstein
A grove of money trees loiter on the hill
covering emeralds and diamonds rich with coal.
No one is allowed to dig for anything,
orders of the Mistress of the Tattoo Garden,
and no one can touch the trees without permission.
When the ink in the water spreads itself too thin,
leaves begin to color themselves denominations
and only then are we allowed to rake the paper money,
each leaf a currency, a spray of gold, each
pile enough to change who we wish to be
into who we want to be and back to who we were.
| Copyright © 2022 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
Michael, as with your “Wintering in the Tattoo Garden of Capella” [April 24], “The Money Garden” is similarly teasing, with its suggestion that the money tree could be either the one the tattoo purveyors are tending with their hordes of customers, or the one customers are stripping of its leaves to lavish on the purveyors in their quest to be something else than the dissatisfied or other-directed people they apparently are, or both the tree of the purveyors and the tree of the wanna-be-something-elses.
ReplyDeleteThank you, thank you. And thank your muse – you must be guided by a daemon to write poetry like this.
Have to agree more or less with Morris, basically that even when I don't have a clue what you're referencing I thoroughly enjoy how you do it! One can only use the word "evocative" so often. Literary hugs
ReplyDeleteThank you, Roger and Moristotle, for your most kind words.
ReplyDelete