Nels Hanson
The Garden
What felt a continent diminishes, a dwindling
atoll as human wave crests and you remember
who sailed to that other island years ago, its portal
hinged one way, wreathed with shells, whorled
and murmuring open sea waits down a passage
dared by voyagers more numerous than living
few whose names you know. Good friends take
ship for farthest lands until your days resemble
an orphanage you share with a frightening specter
become familiar, singing alluring lullabies. Time
dissolves, blossoming pure green, and the lost seem
fortunate, finding the garden’s wicket gate, your
garden’s bounty glowing dust. In sleep they call
to you, palms pressing windowpane and breath
misting glass you mark with dreaming fingertip,
scrawl a pledge to citizens no longer exiles there,
fabled isle you feared above all harbors. A trace
of roses wafts leeward shore and evening hints
at morning when dusk subsides. Stars mirrored
by ocean black as sky suggest a new sun rising
on a horizon your compass won’t discover here.
The Garden
What felt a continent diminishes, a dwindling
atoll as human wave crests and you remember
who sailed to that other island years ago, its portal
hinged one way, wreathed with shells, whorled
and murmuring open sea waits down a passage
dared by voyagers more numerous than living
few whose names you know. Good friends take
ship for farthest lands until your days resemble
an orphanage you share with a frightening specter
become familiar, singing alluring lullabies. Time
dissolves, blossoming pure green, and the lost seem
fortunate, finding the garden’s wicket gate, your
garden’s bounty glowing dust. In sleep they call
to you, palms pressing windowpane and breath
misting glass you mark with dreaming fingertip,
scrawl a pledge to citizens no longer exiles there,
fabled isle you feared above all harbors. A trace
of roses wafts leeward shore and evening hints
at morning when dusk subsides. Stars mirrored
by ocean black as sky suggest a new sun rising
on a horizon your compass won’t discover here.
Nels Hanson’s fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 12, and 2014. Poems appeared in Word Riot, Oklahoma Review, Pacific Review and other magazines and received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize and a 2015 Best of the Net nomination.