Marco Wilkinson - Madder: A Memoir in Weeds

a memoir in weeds

Marco Wilkinson

Minneapolis

2021

Copyright 2021 by Marco Wilkinson

Cover artwork, When the flesh sleeps, everything sleeps,

2015 by Nunzio Paci

Cover design by Carlos Esparza

Book design by Bookmobile

Author photograph Jesse Sutton

Succession may be downloaded in its original landscape format at www.coffeehousepress.org.

Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, .

Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Wilkinson, Marco, 1976author.

Title: Madder : a memoir in weeds / Marco Wilkinson.

Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2021.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021021005 (print) | LCCN 2021021006 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566896184 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781566896276 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Wilkinson, Marco, 1976 | HorticulturistsUnited StatesBiography. | Authors, American21st centuryBiography.

Classification: LCC SB63.W55 A3 2021 (print) | LCC SB63.W55 (ebook) | DDC 635.092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021005

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021006

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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This work is for

my mother[my father]

who gave me
this.

This is not how it happened at all.

What is the truest fact of your life?

Youve got it all wrong.

La madrugada estalla como una estatua

Como una estatua de alas que se dispersan por la ciudad

Y el medioda canta campana de agua Campana de agua

de oro que nos prohibe la soledad

Y la noche levanta su copa larga

su larga copa larga, luna temprana por sobre el mar

Pero para Mara no hay madrugada,

pero para Mara no hay medioda,

pero para Mara ninguna luna,

alza su copa roja sobre las aguas

Mara no tiene tiempo (Mara Land)

de alzar los ojos

Mara de alzar los ojos (Mara Land)

rotos de sueo

Mara rotos de sueo (Mara Land)

de andar sufriendo

Mara de andar sufriendo (Mara Land)

slo trabaja

Mara slo trabaja, slo trabaja, slo trabaja

Mara slo trabaja

y su trabajo es ajeno

Mara Land, Mara Land, Mara Land,

Mara Land slo trabaja,

Mara Land slo trabaja,

Mara Land slo trabaja

Mara Land slo trabaja

y su trabajo es ajeno

Csar Calvo, Mara Land, as sung by Susana Baca

[

Someone hides from someone else

Hides under his tongue

The other looks for him under the earth

He hides on his forehead

The other looks for him in the sky

He hides inside his forgetfulness

The other looks for him in the grass

Looks for him looks

Theres no place he doesnt look

And looking he loses himself

Vasko Popa, Hide-and-Seek
]

I am a gardener, this birthright from grandmother and mother and aunt passed down and diagonally to me. A stolen bit of history, intil, this useless love. For much of my adult life I have worked my hands through plant leaves and plant roots; worked my mind through folklore and Latin names, soil and air; worked myself into this semblance of a garden, staving off the weeds.

But the more I garden the less I weed. Burdocks root reaches too deep. Madder runs riot through the back places. Shepherds purse gives itself away to the wind heart- by heart- by heart-shaped seed. Instead I forage. I make friends with the excessive and out-of-place, this unkempt garden. My life, these weeds.

A weed is excessive, too good for its own or anyone elses good. Virtuosic in its reach and fecundity. It exceeds expectations. An overachiever, it surprises and perplexes when so little was asked of it.

A weed is out of place. It cannot say how it got here, to this lonely spot. To say it has pilgrimed here would suppose intention and a singular trip carried out in one body to one place. Rather this travel has been going on endlessly across generations: a nomadic life. One day, out of places: here.

I am a gardener and find myself year after year less able to do what is necessary to keep up the semblance of a garden. Redbud seedlings invade and I think of the rough nodules of their roots fixing nitrogen in the soil. Spiderwort fountains out of unexpected places, but its flowers are the purple-blue of the deepest summer-twilight sky. Dandelions are not even weeds to me anymore, to my neighbors great disappointment, but bitter tonic in salads, rich sweetness in tea, acidy pickles in pasta, cheerful reminder to be optimistic even in desperate circumstances.

As I write this, my seventy-three-year-old mother, who has been visiting us for a month due to waning health, is outside vigorously, single-mindedly, furiously hacking at weeds coming up between the flagstones of our front walk. For her there is no question of order and its need, of the immorality of weeds or their excision. Some things must not be allowed to rise up. Though she is resolute, I cant tell anymore if my life is choked with weeds or nothing but them. Whether to make a reckoning of it means clearing a little space of legibility or taking field notes on the little and the many that populate this space, this semblance, this life. I cannot tell, except by telling.

I forage this little life from here and there. Violet leaves from the lawn, sumac seeds from the highway shoulder, wild grapes off the chain-link fence. I dry summers linden flowers for the winter. I dig up and casket shovel-killer dock roots in alcohol, reinterred in my basement as medicine for the future. I ferment cloves of garlic in honey, preserving one and transforming both.

I do all these things because I want to remember. Remember that the little and the useless are what knit the visible world together. Remember that there is no such thing as absence, only ache.

I do this haphazardly, without efficiency or logic. Scrape the root to the bright core to stain this blank page. Scry meaning from the resulting patterns, worrying the contours between memory and fantasy and oblivion. Assemble bones into a body Ive never seen before. Lay seeds where its heart might be.

I am a gardener who can no longer garden, so painfully in love am I with everything that might be. These thousands of gardens of the mind all live, overlaying each other in possibility. How to undo one for another? How to pluck out for the withering heap one life and not mourn? So much, dissembled, has confused the maps. So much is taken away from us, and so early.

This morning I sent a card to my eighty-seven-year-old father (seventeen years after the last one), directed to an address whose front door has never opened for me. I can peer down from space at the light-brown roof, the white concrete driveway, and a red sedan thanks to Google Maps, but I cant fly down into the branches of the tree out front and search wordlessly through a window. There is an artificial pond behind the house, the heart of this little ring of suburban houses. A diffuse white explosion in the center must be an aerator spraying water into the air, but I cant soar through prismatic space and get caught on a breeze to land and evaporate in an instant on the back of his papery, wrinkled, spotted hand, resting on the arm of his favorite backpatio armchair. Street View cameras mounted atop a car havent crawled along his street yet, so I cant stare at his front door and wonder what knocking on it might be like.