Madison Mainwaring

Weed in a French Garden

The horticulturalists, astronauts
with clippers, shape the hedges
in straight lines, their hands firm 

with a blade. In this stilled pool
of beauty, there’s no “outside,”
no nature at all, really. 

Even the sun here
is in fact not the sun,
harnessed like a cheetah in a cage 

as elaborate metaphor
for the absolute power of the king. 
Don’t be tricked by the lack of a fence, 

the eighteen signs saying bienvenu.
You are not meant to be
in this world. The light is deigned. 

*

But you there, thorny one
outside the botanical lexicon,
thrust up between the path’s white gravel bits 

—at two inches tall,
you're dreaming up a thicket so overgrown
the sun cannot touch its center.

The great escape
is inward, born from the carcasses

of previous lives, a wilderness within
the garden of our hearts, the doe

racing toward the interior,
freed from the hunter’s vision—

before a gloved hand reaches down
and pulls, covering up the root hole
with a boot.