The Poet

It isn't me, for sure, the hen next-door. ...!

'She' was always watering the plants. That's how you know a hen! His grandmother gave him a little flowerbox at the side of the house when he must have been six years old, where his 'Song of India' pleomele species thrives rampant today, eight feet high. Every time he waters this plant he remembers the tree-like one he once saw in town in his 'hoeing heydays' when he was young and beautiful - well he thought he was, and at least one or two others, okay, several others willing to say anything to get some free loving - well he thinks his 'Song of India' is almost as wonderful as that one.

But his doesn't have the trunk, the thickness that made that one fabulous. Fabulous, everything had to be fabulous, and he'll be darned if his garden isn't fabulous one day. It has had some fabulous moments. There were times when people slowed and stared, in admiration one assumed, but not always, at something in his garden that was really a fabulous too much, maybe even at him.

Once there was the cascading pink Congea at the front gate that no one else had, there was the whimsical whitewashed rockery and birdbath another time, the guava tree with the treehouse and children in pyjamas and blankets tumbling out one night, the rose garden, his rose garden down the side of the house which some people remember even today, the roses along the front fence, the hybrid crotons, the Cereus cactus taller than the house that bore hundreds and hundreds of fragrant white flowers that opened at night and attracted thousands of insects, the orchids, oh the orchids that shot out and cascaded in sprays and sprays of dendrobium and phalanaeopsis and oncidium blooms all over his front porch, and his fishpond. And his Julie mango trees, his lime tree that never stopped bearing, that rare white mussaeanda, and that hibiscus he planted outside the fence that used to be covered with fuchsia pink flowers like no one had ever seen till his uncle walked up the hill one day when he was out there carefully pruning and fertilising it just to say to him that in all his life - and he was now retired and an expert grower himself - just to tell him that in all his life he had never seen a hibiscus shrub that beautiful and healthy and so covered with flowers anywhere in the island.

It was never easy for the hen though. Where others boasted how they had a green thumb and everything just grew and flourished with them, and he would see fabulous plants growing neglected in other people's gardens everywhere, the hen fought tooth and nail all the time for his plants and later his garden to look like anything. Something was always attacking his plants, they needed manure and fertilizer and sprays and fungicides and careful pruning and constant watering as his house was on a hill, not in a valley, and then the snails and slugs came, the dry season, the tiredness when he began teaching and he just gave it up for weeks. ... Then the dogs. And the money for the gardener. It was always too much.

But neighbours could always be assured of some entertainment when the little hen, now the big hen, was in the garden fighting or chasing the dogs, screaming and cussing at fruit or plant thieves at all hours of the day or night, or battling with branches, pests, and her drug addict gardener. The hen, now in advanced middle age, was convinced that 'Maljo' or the 'bad eye' was real, as she'd witnessed the demise of many glorious specimens over the years, gone down never to recover after someone watched them or commented on them, intentionally or not. It's a wonder at all she's still there. Oops! His garden is still there.

This evening she was a bit fed-up she told me. The two huge hybrid crotons she's struggled with all through the dry season and watered and fertilised and sprayed diligently, and which had just been covered with a fabulous flush of large healthy new leaves, beginning to look like they should, the most fabulous specimens in anyone's garden the town had ever seen, no sooner than inexplicably - or explicably if you count that both his favourite successful sister and her husband(who abhors rampant growth) - both had 'watched' her crotons admiringly. Now all the beautiful new leaves, all, were falling off and the fucking trees were looking a starving beat up mess. God bless them, she thought, they can't help it (not the crotons!). A whole season's work falling in a litter of healthy leaves, and the hen must start all over again, spraying and fertilising and watering in, or chop them the fuck down(prune back vigorously that is). But he can't do that. One was planted in the '70's, the other when he started teaching, they've survived much, and his sister did everything to keep them going while he was abroad for ten years. ... He can't just chop them down now, the fucking crotons. You can't just get rid of fabulous things or things that could be or have been fabulous and wonderful he believes. Sigh!

The stupid drug addict labourer who does odd jobs for him wants him to cut down the Solanum in the back which has grown to seven feet tall and ten feet wide, but he won't because his brother brought that home from his office when the company went bust in '88 and the hen had always wanted that plant which was too expensive for him to buy. He was pooor poor poor at the time, 'self-employed', the euphemism for 'ketching his ass' designing and sewing and painting fabrics, and his brother brought it home and he 'de planted it there, just so in that spot in 1988. His brother migrated and has never come back, but every time he's watering his garden he remembers his brother brought him that plant. And there's the huge, much too huge, Flaming fucking Poinciana tree that's pushed down the bloody wall and has no business to be there that his godson's father planted. No one can get him to cut it down. It's the only Flamboyant tree in the country he thinks with double fabulous red flowers, that continues flowering and is covered with blooms into the first week of September when school has reopened. He remembers ironing his trousers and shirt for the first day in September with the red flowers outside the louvres and thinking What the Hell, mine is the only Flamboyant that's flowering right into September, all through the rainy season, crazy like its owner, 'one of a fucking kind. ...! Won't give up!'

Fabulous and rampant. Rampant and fabulous! Who remembers? Well the hen remembers. The hen will never forget when beauty triumphed. Others wish he would, and never mention or talk about those things. Or the constant battle. There were roses, Patsa and Picture roses, and Peace, and Queen Elizabeth and Princess Elizabeth and American Beauty, Tiffany, Tropicana, Cinderella and Whisky Mac all...