The Garden

By Mark Strand b. 1934 Mark Strand

for Robert Penn Warren

It shines in the garden,

in the white foliage of the chestnut tree,

in the brim of my father’s hat

as he walks on the gravel.

In the garden suspended in time

my mother sits in a redwood chair:

light fills the sky,

the folds of her dress,

the roses tangled beside her.

And when my father bends

to whisper in her ear,

when they rise to leave

and the swallows dart

and the moon and stars

have drifted off together, it shines.

Even as you lean over this page,

late and alone, it shines: even now

in the moment before it disappears.

Source: Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990)

Biography

Mark Strand is recognized as one of the premier contemporary American poets as well as an accomplished editor, translator and prose writer. The hallmarks of his style are precise language, surreal imagery, and the recurring theme of absence and negation; later collections investigate ideas of the self with pointed, often urbane wit. Named the U.S. Poet Laureate in 1990, Strand’s career has spanned nearly four decades, and he has . . .

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