The Sundial’s Whisper in the Garden of Hours
an iron gate, arthritic with rust, concedes its vigil to the ivy’s coup.
Here, the air is thick with ghosts of roses—crimson, cream, and bone—
their perfume a language spoken solely by the stones.
Old Erasmus tends this plot, his hands a map of root and rain,
each crease a ledger of seasons spent coaxing life from loam’s disdain.
The sundial at the garden’s heart, its gnomon blunt with age,
casts a finger across his face, inscribing dusk upon his page.
*“Time,”* he mutters to the silence, *“is a thief who sows his loot—
a pocket full of stolen dawns, a satchel crammed with trampled fruit.”*
The marble nymph beside the pool, her lips eternally apart,
holds a note no throat has uttered since the fracture of his heart.
Once, this ground knew other steps—a laugh that shook the lilacs free,
a voice that spun the spider’s silk to golden filigree.
Eleanor, they named her shadow, though the sun withdrew its claim
when she folded like a petal into earth’s unyielding frame.
Now, the trellis weeps wisteria where her fingers once entwined,
and the fountain chokes on memories it can neither speak nor find.
Erasmus counts the hours in the blight of blushing blooms,
in the way the dahlia’s crimson deepens, like a wound that never scums.
*“Speak to me,”* he begs the statues, *“if only in the wind’s false tongue.
Tell me she did not dissolve—that some essence clings, unsung.”*
But the cherubs, their eyes polished blank by decades of disdain,
guard their secrets in the soil where her laughter feeds the rain.
Autumn comes, a slow infection. Vines, once emerald, bleed to rust.
The sundial’s verse grows cryptic, its numbers dim with distrust.
Erasmus feels the chill conspire in the hollow of his cloak,
as the garden, bit by bit, unstitches every thread he spoke.
One noon, a stranger breaches thickets—a youth with April in his face,
bearing tools to tame the wilderness, to resurrect this place.
*“Sir,”* he offers, *“let me mend these paths that grief has overthrown.
A garden should be tended, not entombed, lest love die alone.”*
The old man’s spine stiffens, a birch against a gale.
*“You’ll find no love here, boy—only roots that strangle, thorns that pale.
This earth is not for sowing; it’s a sepulcher that breathes.
Now leave, before the twilight binds your ankles with its sheaves.”*
Yet the lad persists, a spade in hand, upturning clots of years,
exposing worms that writhe like questions, damp with unshed tears.
Erasmus watches, torn as brambles, as petals long interred
awaken, wan and trembling, to the bite of blade and word.
*“See?”* the youth cajoles, *“Beneath the rot, the seeds remember spring.
The soil’s a patient scribe—it writes what ruin cannot sing.”*
But the gardener retreats, a wraith, to the dial’s fractured base,
where the hours pool like mercury, erasing every trace.
Winter arrives, a leper-king, his robe a shroud of rime.
The nymph’s cracked throat exhales a frost that murders thyme and time.
Erasmus, gaunt as January, kneels where the roses slept,
his palms pressed to the frozen ground where all his yesterdays are kept.
*“Eleanor,”* the wind intones, or perhaps it is his mind,
*“you left the gate ajar, my dear. The dark is hard to find.”*
A cough wracks through his ribs—a sound of branches split by snow.
The sundial shudders, shifts its stance, then lets its shadow go.
Dawn discovers two men kneeling where the frost has sketched its creed:
one, a sapling washed with sweat, the other, a fallen seed.
The youth’s hands, raw with labor, brush the old man’s stony cheek,
while the garden, holding its breath, hears the silence finally speak.
*“Forgive me,”* Erasmus whispers, not to the boy, nor stone, nor sky,
but to the earth that cradles now the dream he’d let dry.
A single crocus, violet-veined, parts the frost where his last breath
unspools into the morning—a root embracing death.
The stranger stays, as seasons wheel, to wrestle weed and thorn,
to train the ivy’s restless hands where Erasmus’s love was torn.
Yet each dusk, when shadows pool like ink beneath the dial’s face,
two figures seem to linger—one bent, one veiled in lace.
The nymph, her features blurred by moss, weeps stones into the pool.
The sundial, stoic, counts the hours, its lesson never cruel:
*All gardens are but borrowed ground, where beauty dares to bide,
a fleeting pact between the bloom and the darkness at its side.*
