Container Gardening

One of you recommended that I read Ellen Steinbaum's volume of poetry entitled Container Gardening, and I did. I was so grateful for the recommendation that I actually went back and tried to figure out who told me about it, but to no avail. My no-credit-no-blame system is too efficient.

My favorite one in the volume is this poem, "standing at the shore":

afterwards we will
look at it and say
this was when we still or
this was before
but then we will not be
at that same soft moment
grouped in pastel shirts
the children giddy with being
on the beach at nearly bedtime
digging their toes into the sand
wild to escape to the waves
get their clothes wet
looking back we may see
the messy instant of everyone
trying to be perfect or
we may see it
framed by then
glowing
that minute
when we did not know where
we would be looking back from

Possibly this is my favorite simply because this is the time of year when I call on memories of our once-every-two-years trip to the beach in South Carolina to sustain me through the long, northern winter. I think it's also my favorite because I tend to think of my own poems as snapshots; the last time I made a collection of them, I gave it the title "Preface to Photo Albums Three and Four." Most of all I like the lines "this was when we still or/this was before," because my photos of our beach trips cover years before one of the children was born, years when my parents sat on the porch with my friend's mother, years with portable cribs, and, recently, years with adult-size children who each require a bed of their own.

Steinbaum has a number of "snapshot" poems in this volume. "One Photograph" begins with the line "She will not become my mother for another thirty years." Another poem, "At the Time Exchange," demands that we "Picture them: the old/whose every waking is/a disappointment...." And in "How We Become Ordinary," you can see the process of a woman becoming "just a mother" in her child's future photo album: "It starts in such small ways...." The best of the lot, after "Standing at the shore," is the poem entitled "The Time Emporium" which asks "which was your favorite/bauble--the perfect summer evening....Or maybe the birthday/when you were six....Which, looking back, would you never/exchange for what was coming next?"

The title poem, "Container Gardening," is about plants that have to "sip water doled out by the cup" on a balcony where "no earthworms/ crawl among these roots, no weeds invade." It's similar in tone to "Order," in which the speaker informs us "I always know where/the tape measure is now." The idea of control pervades this volume, and each page gives readers the sense that the pot won't be big enough to contain all the days, "more days, if we are lucky,/than we will think to count,/piling up like shelter/at our door."

This is just the right volume for this time of year, at least for someone like me, who hates the dead of winter and can be sustained for a while by images of growing things.