Augie March: The Good Gardener (On How He Fell)

Here sits a once good gardener, pale as a shadow of a doubt.
Once a happy dweller of a garden good, once a sleepy sinner,
once cast out
To the sea where the crossy-eyed maids murmur low, "do you see, do you see
where the doubts cross his shadow?"
Drowned and amoral, I pollinate the coral and reek of the deep
where I've tended the water weed -
I was once your good gardener, sing to bring on Spring.
I know where your good grass grows,
I know what your boyfriend knows,
I was your good gardener.

I saw twilight car waxers, corpulent dog walkers, clean canny couples on the sunset strip,
From a tower forty miles to the east of Augusta saw a plague on the Indian
a'coming on a windship.
You were in the garden when the wind swept up and took the foul words from your mouth,
Now you know what your sarcasm really really means,
It's the tearing with your teeth of the flesh from the bones of your brother -

Kill the shrub to fertilise the flower,
Did I hear you saying that the form doesn't matter?
Well form into matter, the matter is forever, but only in a good garden.

Black Rock bound in the Brighton bowl where the seas of desolation roll,
Where you're borne and borne and borne in again to the pebble-feather shore of forgotten friends.
Think how you can't see the science without seeing first the self,
But then nobody thinks of growing somebody else,
And how the sun, hungry sun, holds the withered withered world,
So why shouldn't I kiss the beautiful girl?

When I was her good gardener.
Sing of the Summer sham,
O see them grow tall, see them in their rot, see them go to seed in the cemetery plot.
I was your good gardener.

Sing to bring on Spring,
O ice of Winter would crackle and splinter with my love in everything,
Ice of Winter would crackle and splinter with my love in everything,
I was your good gardener...

The sea is stark and lovely, and it scares me to the point of rapture,
I was your good gardener, of some good stature.
The sea is stark and lovely, and it scares me to the point of rapture,
I was your good gardener, now I - can barely - look at ya