Temenos

by Gregory Leadbetter

This garden is laid like the footprint of a temple

dug from a plain of lizard-picked earth

that remembers the buried city in its gut

only in the ghost of a name that blows

with its dust in heat without rain.

This garden is a ghost whose name is lost.

This might be a knotwork of roots that bound

the bright space of a soul in its hedge,

if a soul can be sown and raised in a place:

might show in lupin, rose and vine,

the scarlet anemone spilt on the air,

the hum of all living cupped in a flower.

The one who walked in the shade of its noon

ate figs pulled from the flesh he had grown.

Finches perched on its speechless thought

while thrushes spoke from its bower in flames.

The one who listened is a soul gone to seed

in ivy that creeps over barren ground.

This garden is the grave of its hallowed plot:

this outline the cell of an empty god.

The cicada sings from its hollow skin.

At the centre of the garden is a rough-hewn post

draped with a cloak and a purple bough,

hung with the mask of a laughing face.