Grounds Keeping: The Idleness is Full of God’s Activity
Fox Rinne
What were they then that are what they are now
—A. R. Ammons, Garbage #2
FALL
I started the groundskeeper job in the fall. A lot changed quickly. I was getting up at 5 A.M., I was losing a lot of sleep, I was in the men’s locker room, trying to pass as a man among men for the first time. I felt like anything I did could be a slip up. I kept to myself for a long time. Some just thought I was really young. There was a wide distance between my work self and my other self. At night, I would stare down that long hallway of routine— the two trains waiting for me in the morning, the gray tunnels, the men I was hiding between, the certain man I had to be to keep being a man. I joined the procession of sleeping construction workers in the morning. Reflective chests, worn boots, open slack mouths, crossed arms like fathers who fell asleep in front of the TV. The train would click over the bridge with the moon still up, still full. Mostly, we kept sleeping.
I recognized one guy because he got off a few stops into my ride, and I could always take his good seat on the end. I wondered if he recognized me too, other half of the trade.
One day, the station where I transferred was filled with fog. Every man was a murky shape, a shadow with a hat. I thought something was happening or about to happen, but the train came, we got on, we got to work on time. It wasn’t the weather, I don’t know what it was.
I came to the job when the leaves were falling. One guy said, “The leaves never stop falling. There are always leaves. Spring, summer, doesn’t matter. Different kinds of leaves fall at different times.” I raked the pathways and the bus stops. I swept the leaves into the woods. At the same time, I was texting Elle who’d just seen Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” in Chicago. She sent me a picture of the candy between her teeth, flirtatious, but wrote, “hurt to eat.” It was a familiar piece, but now I had questions.
“Do you know how often the pile is replenished? Do they weigh it every day?” The pile of candy in the corner of the museum had an “ideal weight” of 175 pounds, the average body weight of an adult man or perhaps the ideal weight of the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, who died of complications from AIDS in 1991. People take candy and eat it, and the pile slowly diminishes. I raked and raked and every day, the leaves replenished, and I wondered about the body of the lover depleting, but never being allowed to completely disappear. Has anyone seen the pile worn down to a handful? To nothing? Candy crossed the world, and a ghost was fragmented with it. In the caption of the piece, it says there is an “endless supply” of candies.
James and I were walking in Green-Wood Cemetery where he was working a job restoring mausoleums. James was my girlfriend’s almost-boyfriend, and we were becoming friends. I asked him
about the pile of candy, and he knew the answer. He said it depends on the museum. Mostly they restock it every week before it gets too small. But sometimes, yes, they let it deplete to nothing. Of course, the same pile of the same candy crops up somewhere else across the world soon enough. Apparently that licorice candy is stored in a warehouse somewhere and is very valuable. The leaves did end. The trees were bare at the same time, as if this was something I had to relearn because it was suddenly my labor. But they fell from the hills of the woods and piled on the side of the asphalt every time it stormed, and I carried a rake in the back of the truck all through summer.
I remember the first winter, two winters ago, I wanted to be a man all the time. It was peak COVID. I’d dress up for the grocery store cashier, and they would either sir or ma’am me. The stakes felt very high.
I told my friend Reed in their car one night that I thought I might be a boy. Full-time, full-blooded. I felt ashamed. I didn’t want to have to say it, I wanted everyone to see me and already know. At the same time, I thought I couldn’t say it out loud because everyone would look at me and think it just wasn’t true.
All but one of the groundskeepers in the north end of the park were men. Half of those men had been keeping the same grounds anywhere between ten and thirty years. It felt like a safe and masculine form of caretaking. It came with solitude, calluses, expertise, and heavy equipment. You’re everyone’s neighbor and no one’s father. People waved or yelled or asked what you were doing or told you what they wished you were doing, but you clocked out at 3:30 p.m. You could take off your uniform and walk through the park, and no one would remember you cut the grass
there, you pruned the bushes. A handful of guys worked overtime every night to make more money for their children. I clipped the grass too short in bald patches sometimes, and no one seemed to notice.
(Objects found in Central Park, 2022-2023)
There were rules, exchanges. I had to pick up trash to earn the reward of treasure. If I missed a flosser or a shred of aluminum, I could be forfeiting the trade.
I took my girlfriend, Amara, to the Natural History Museum for the first time for her birthday, and I brought her down under the stairs to the sperm whale and the giant squid. They were huge and wrestling in the dark. Half of the display was gray and empty and it called you to step inside. That night at the club, floor fogged up and walls dripping with spider plants, I was the sperm whale and she was the giant squid. She was the sperm whale and I was the giant squid. We wrapped ourselves up in each other. We were ancient. We had many limbs.
The Dilators covered old songs from trans bands that didn’t exist anymore or that moved away. A few months later, The Dilators didn’t exist anymore either. Shiloh screamed from the stage, “Transsexuals! Transvestites! And chicks with dicks all getting our kicks!” Amara growled and clawed in the mosh pit. Her friend Hazel smiled, “Girls are allowed to be scary.”
There were four of us, and a few others, and we were all entangled. We used that word a lot. Amara and I had been together about a year. Amara and James started dating in late summer. James and I were becoming friends, and I was slowly amassing a crush on him. He and Hazel were falling in love. Amara and Hazel were best friends. Some of us were growing closer, others slowly apart, which made it strange—like a creature lopsidedly elongating. This was the season when we were all good friends. I had a specific dream of us going to the county fair in my hometown in July. I hadn’t been back home in eight or nine years, to that fair in even longer. I wanted to be teenagers again together.
At the end of the Twilight Zone episode, “Walking Distance,” after time-traveling to his childhood and back, Martin Sloan puts a cigarette between his teeth and drives away, the lesson being that a man can never go back, can never go home. There’s something appealing about watching a man perform the caricature of being a man. A shell I could crawl into just as easily, make a home of, if I couldn’t go back.
My boss drove me around my section of the park—roughly everything between Boys’ Gate and Strangers’ Gate—and pointed to a strip of woods between roads: “Den’s in there.” I’d been asking, eager. I went alone a few days later. An upturned tree, soil like dust, a hole beneath. I started visiting, tools in hands, pretending to be busy with otherwise. I would stand in front of the den, waiting, imagining being surprised, even attacked. A dog walker told me she watched the coyote strut down the drive in the daylight. All dogs are off leash that early. It could hide, pretending to belong to someone.
I started to bring the dead when I’d find them. A rat, a pigeon. And the next day, they’d be gone, feathers down the drain.
I worried the den was abandoned, empty. I found a duck with fresh blood dripping from its eye and brought it over, left it under a pile of leaves under a small log in case someone would pass by and notice the offering. I circled the den three times. I said, “Please.” I asked for a life I wanted.
The duck disappeared a day later. The leaves and the log seemed untouched. But I looked, and there was no trace of the duck.
to keep: to hold, to seek after, to desire (from late Old English cepan)
I had my spells, and there were spells all around me. After a storm, jam jars often wriggled loose from the dirt—inside each was a photograph of a loved one soaked in vinegar, their names and birthdays written over and over on the back. I mostly found them in groups, several buried and unearthed together. I reburied them.
Days turned over. I walked into a pile of bright candy wrappers. They hadn’t been there twelve hours ago. I found three emptied Tito’s nips and a bottle of poppers. I was practicing taking in the reality of things. This had happened here last night: someone ate an entire bag of candy, someone fucked in the bushes. Every day I found someone else’s routine: the same beer cans and cigarette packs behind the same wall, the same candy wrappers in the same place. I took it away. I turned the day over again.
When I opened the “LGBTQ+ History” page on the park’s website, it was all gay statues and architects—no mention of the benches at night, clenched bark, covered mouths, quiet, and the used condom I stood over in the woods in the morning.
to keep: to observe or carry out in practice; to look out for, to regard, to pay attention to (from Proto-Germanic kopjan)
The park’s conservancy thrived on a narrative of itself as a “board of guardians” restoring the park from the “decline” of the 1960s and 70s, taking over almost all management from the City Parks Department in 1998. I was curious what they believed they were restoring it back to. What about the perfume bottles, animal bones, blue-flowered bowls, shirt buttons, screws and nails of Seneca Village found beneath the soil? It was exactly what I found on the surface, just a layer beneath. How far back should we pull the carpet? How many feet deep was Manahatta? How far down did you have to go to reach a grave?
Painted “Watch Spring” Salt-Glazed Stonware Jar/Jug Body Sherd (Mid-18th Century to 1815)
(NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission—Seneca Village Project, 2018)
In 1871, less than twenty years after the city evicted the Seneca Village residents and began building Central Park, park workers found the coffin of a young black boy while the crew was digging the new entrance at West 86th Street. Fifty years later, a groundskeeper named Gilhooley found a human skull at the same site while just “turning soil.” Upon further excavation, the city found an entire graveyard and named it Gilhooley’s Burial Plot.
My boss asked me to cut back the bushes near the Balancing Rock. He said he wanted the cops to be able to drive by and see into the woods from their cars. He said, “We have to keep the riffraff out.” He was always saying “riffraff” like a cartoon. He was a weird guy. He bred Maine Coons, the giant cats, and showed them at auctions. He was straightforward. “We have to keep the bad ones out to keep the good ones in.” Out where? And in where? Maybe he got these kinds of ideas from breeding fancy cats.
I remember learning during the uprisings in 2020 that city parks are surrounded by high walls so cops can easily block all exits. My boss would drive by and every time, he’d point at the bushes. “Open it up. Why not open it up?” I cut the bushes. They grew back thicker.
to keep: prevent from entering or leaving, force to remain or stay (late 14c.)
In Washington Square Park, on the last warm day of fall, James and I lay next to each other with our shirts unbuttoned. The scars of our chests sprawled and aligned. I said I couldn’t believe how open I must’ve been. The width of my whole body, really. He nodded, said the doctor told him it was eleven inches of open.
I thought about the machines I took to the hills to level the grass. I thought about what of the body didn’t need maintenance or repetition. My body was depleted. Sensation replenished soon enough.
I told him what I’d learned from a trans med student I met at a bar once: A doctor and a med student each work on a nipple at the same time. I said I could tell who did what. They solder around the nipples, and the chest is left with two smoking holes. Then they sew you up, sit you up, and look at you across the room, checking the evenness of their work. I imagined my head hanging. I imagined it was careful, almost loving, but thinking of myself limp and maneuvered like that was terrifying.
Just before the first frost, I found a yellow drawstring bag in the dirt beside a bench. I dug it out and inside was a tuxedo cat, wrapped in a blue flannel. It wasn’t there yesterday. I carried him
with me in the rig for the rest of the day, unsure what to do. But another groundskeeper, the youngest of us, called “Youngblood” accordingly, said at lunch, “You can bury him, if you want. We all do it.” I brought the cat to a deeper spot in the woods, chose a nice pine. I thought about his owners who I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. I thought about the cat every time I passed that tree. Every time I would wonder how far along he was. I almost wanted to open the hole back up just to see.
I raked the leaves on the sidewalk into piles and threw them over the wall of the park into the woods only to find the same path burdened with leaves again the next day. It was the fate of maintenance. It felt like we were hardly scraping by, tending to each day only to repeat it the next. But the leaves in the woods decayed and fertilized. We were piling death toward death until death eventually ended, so quietly, with other tasks replacing it so swiftly, we didn’t even notice.
WINTER
The lamb’s ear was frozen. Old injuries—elbow, knee—sounded their bells in the cold. At the same time, the world seemed to rush out new terms of endearment, mostly “brother.”
Leo started the groundskeeping job in the winter. People confused us for each other though he had long straight hair and I had short curly hair. But my hair grew long and some days we both wore it in ponytails.
He grew up in Maryland and had visited Central Park once as a kid. He texted me on his off day a few months into knowing each
other: “i was just thinking the other day that when i went on a girl scout trip to central park in fifth grade khol [the oldest of us still here] was a groundskeeper there.”
We pruned in the winter so the trees wouldn’t feel it. We cut what was dead and diseased, knotted and overlapping, we worked two at a time on the same tree. We stood back to look. The gardener taught us what to see and how to cut it cleanly.
to keep: to take care of, look after; protect or preserve (someone or something) from harm, damage, etc. (mid-13c.)
I joked to myself that this job paid me to drive around in the cold rain and think about love. It felt then like we were trying to see what was possible. How close could the four of us all be? How many of us could we love at the same time? Could we be good to each other? Could it be easy? What if we let it be easy? I wondered about the relation between love and protection. River and I walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, and I said, “What can we really protect each other from?”
I said I thought touch could feel like a kind of protection. My best friend, Ivan, had his arm around me in a boat in Wyoming, speeding away from young and very pointy mountains, and I felt protected by his love, like it would span all of time. River had a lover exorcize them with a knife, making shallow cuts all over their body. They held each other after, and River’s wounds hissed between them.
This was the same person who, months earlier, sent River a package in the mail after one date. Inside was good honey, self-timed Polaroids, and an Altoids tin of two dead moths with their wings
splayed. River ghosted them for a month afterwards, overwhelmed by the gesture. But some nights they would pull out the Altoids tin, open it and look at the moths, then put it back under their bed.
I was thinking about what we might unprotect ourselves from.
A woman waved me down and led me to a tufted titmouse with a broken neck hopping in the road, its head turned crooked, its eyes stuck facing up at me. I had to catch it though it flew horribly and terrified, had to fold it into the dark of my jacket, and carry it to more hands and further places. I held the fluttering ball of my coat in my lap, shushed it, said, “It’ll be okay,” but really, asking, begging for that to be true. I was having a hard winter. I was going to urgent care all the time—the ER one night where I held a piece of myself in my hand. Amara was injuring me and another way to be together didn’t feel possible. I was obsessed with questions of desire and worth. Was it bad to want someone to house your love? Would you always inevitably want their love to shelter you back? There were things I didn’t let myself want.
to keep: to restrain (someone) from doing something (early 13c.)
I wrapped my fingers gently around the bird’s wings to keep it from flailing, and it bit me to blood. A few nights later, a lover pulled me close when I couldn’t ask for it. The bird made a sound I’d never heard before.
I bore a new heft up the stairs to the overgrowth. The gardener gave me a vine’s end, said, “Follow this to the root or lose it.” He said, “Nothing is always a weed, only something growing in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The mulberry root bulged, buried under dirt.
There was once so much I didn’t want from change. This, not that. How could I want what I couldn’t know? Body around the bend.
I found out white-spotted pufferfish create perfect circles on the ocean floor to impress potential lovers. I stared at the pictures of the perfect circles in the sand. Perfect circles inside more perfect circles. I thought, “I have to lay down and absorb this.” It haunted me, I felt like I couldn’t fully take the information into my body. I started thinking this about most of my life, said to myself, “I have to lay down and start taking it all in. I have to go to sleep and believe that people in my life, one by one, mean it when they say they love me. I have to deal with the weight of that. I have to lie down and believe it.” I calmed down after a few days. Maybe the awe depleted over time—was that taking it in?
I watched a woman, bundled thick, hold her hands out to a sparrow like she was warming herself at a fire. She crouched there and, for five minutes, she didn’t move, and the bird didn’t move. When she got up to leave, the bird hopped away, and I carried on collecting trash.
It only snowed once that winter. We spent the whole morning meticulously shoveling the playgrounds. It melted by the afternoon.
SPRING
I liked being inside the weather every day. Mood was a radio station we tuned into. I liked the days after it stormed because old men would say things to me like, “What a mess!” “Lotta rain.” “Big storm last night!” “And there’s more where that came from.”
Crocuses, bedstraw, celandine, bluebells, a Ziploc bag of seeds, a robin’s egg, a bumble bee sleeping in the dirt slowly stirred. Snails. First reptiles. Sunrise on the way in.
A birder in a crowd of birders pulled me away from pruning and said, “Do you see the night heron? The hooded warbler? Do you see the duck nesting in the willow?”
A schoolteacher pointed up. Two baby raccoons chirped and chased each other in the trees.
A woman came up to me and said, “I don’t know if you’re the one I should tell.” A baby raccoon was dead in the grass: smaller than the length of my forearm, blood in his ear, one clouded eye.
A farmer in Montana told me winter wasn’t the season of death—it was spring, the season of the last alive giving up, the newborns that wouldn’t make it more than a few days, and moreso, the melting away of the snow and the reveal of the bodies underneath. In the park, other groundskeepers warned me that spring brought heat, heat brought bacteria, bacteria brought gas, and gas brought the bodies in the bottom of the pond to the surface.
A coworker announced in the break room that there was a dead raccoon in the woods. Who would take care of it? I volunteered. Another baby. Maybe the brother of the first. I dug and whistled “Wild Mountain Thyme,” piled rocks on top of him, tried to throw them lightly, but the body shook each time. This one had no visible blood, no injuries, not even flies yet. Starved? Diseased?
A few years ago, distemper was going around, which made the raccoons wander aimlessly, responding to nothing. The dead raccoon felt outside of me. I wanted to take in the weight of the fact that he had been alive. I had probably watched him play— maybe newborn—and now he was dead, and I buried him, and he would decay. I felt dark-headed on the train home. So quickly it wasn’t about the raccoon anymore. Mostly I was tired. It was easy to give into the feeling of being tired.
Amara asked, “Did you say something for the animal when you buried it?” No, I knelt and tried to imagine what they looked like scurrying and eating and playing. I tried to hold tight to those images, make them tangible and real. When I scooped the baby raccoon into a clear trash bag to move him, I pet his face through the plastic.
Was undertaking masculine? And grieving feminine? The pallbearer and the weeper, was that how this went?
To (under)take and to (grounds)keep. Possessive.
When I buried the second baby, my nails were painted dark blue.
There were gods in that park, and I was talking to them, and they were talking back.
My coworker played a deep-voiced recording of the Bible from the speakers of his golf cart. “Ye eat with the blood and lift up your eyes toward your idols and shed blood: And shall ye possess the land?”
When I was a kid, I pretended to believe in God for a long time— so long, I didn’t even think about actually believing. Until about the same time I knew I wanted to be a boy. That winter I started praying to God—the same God, I thought, as my parents, for the first time. I sat in my room and wanted to know what it felt like to believe in something, to hold something as big as that in your body like it was nothing.
I was reading a book by an Indian Jesuit priest on how to pray. In one exercise, I closed my eyes and moved through myself slowly and waited for sensation. I landed on a quiet part of my body, my left calf, and when I found it devoid of feeling, I waited there.
In my ear, the priest said, “If they persevere in the exercise of prayer and expose themselves, in blind faith, to the emptiness, the darkness, the idleness, the nothingness, they will gradually discover, at first in small flashes, later in a more permanent fashion, that
there is a glow in the darkness, that the emptiness mysteriously fills their heart, that the idleness is full of God’s activity, that in the nothingness their being is recreated and shaped anew . . . and all of this in a way they just cannot describe either to themselves or to others.”
Time passed and, faintly, then brightly, the nerves in my left calf glinted at me. Sensation moved like it was its own animal.
After the compline by candlelight service at St. Paul’s—compline meaning “completion”—walking to the Hudson to sit over the railing edge, James said he tried to feel his lineage in the world, the series of evolution that led to him, that led to everything around him. His phone screensaver was a color-coded stack of geologic periods in the Phanerozoic Eon—Jurassic, Devonian, Cambrian, etc. I didn’t think about my own history like that, I felt far even from my own family. I said my closest experiences of religion were physical, when I felt my blood surprise me, when I was naked in the North Sea, and it was like my body caught fire, I could move flames in the motion of my arms, when my body was almost separate from me, and it was speaking.
to keep: to stay, to remain (early 15c.)
Amara, James, Hazel, a girl I’d dated in Montana, Amber, and I spent Easter Sunday together. We shared hymnals, played guitars that were for sale, and walked through the first garden of spring. James and I handed a book of architectural features back and forth and looked up at the buildings of the Lower East Side—columns, rib vaults, apotropaic gargoyles, and grotesques. Months later, I thought of that day as the time before things broke apart. I had photos of us I didn’t put on my walls, but sometimes I looked at them at night and then put them away.
Onie and I became friends at the back of the bar we all went to, talking about negative theology. I’d been trying to talk about God the way I’d been thinking about it, and she had the words. She was talking about the practice that approaches God by negation, speaking only to what cannot be said of it, as God is unfathomable and inherently indescribable. God was the empty center, something around the corner of nothing, love in the void. To me, that kept awe afloat, that we couldn’t speak of it, that everything we tried would fail, and we had to live our lives in that failure. Like how just the same, I would to some extent spend my whole life failing to be a man.
I listened to a podcast on Meister Eckhart—Onie’s recommendation—as I pulled English ivy. It started talking about the mysticism of the ground—grund in German.
“Grund can, first of all, be understood as physical ground, that is, the earth. Grund can also mean the bottom or lowest side of a body, surface, or structure. Abstractly, grund is employed to indicate the origin, cause, beginning, reason, or proof of something. Finally, grund is employed as what is inmost, hidden, most proper to a being—that is its essence.”
“God’s ground and the soul’s ground is one ground.”
I wrangled out the stubborn roots of burdock. Eckhart, from centuries ago, spoke in my ear, told me that the ground—this shared ground of myself and God’s—was the silent and empty abyss (abgrund in German) of the Godhead, the origin point of reality from which everything emanated and eventually flowed back. Not that I was of God or had God in me, but we were one in the void, the exact same, and this essence of us was incomprehensible and
beyond all language—we existed only through negation. God was something I could never hope to graze, yet He was physical too, I could touch Him, He was the dirt under my knees and the dirt under that and the dirt under that, He was the dirt on my hands on the subway home, and somehow my hands themselves were just as solid, and somehow I was just as real.
Every morning, I heard groundskeepers call out for Angel on the radio. A man stood in the basketball court and listened to an automated woman on his phone define over and over, “Persecute… To hurt someone very badly.” I found a prayer written in Spanish on the back of a Parliaments pack. Google mistranslated the prayer, “I’ll tie you up. Take care.” A starling sprawled its wings in the grass to sun.
If I thought too hard about being a man, it rose like smoke through my fingers; it dissipated to nothing. I could only rely on sensation and the joy I received in sensation—a stranger calling after me, “Hey sir! Hey beautiful man!,” the faint blond hairs across my cheeks. I thought of Simone Weil saying, “Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying ‘I.’” In the purest sensation, there was no thought, no I, no affirmation, no perception. I was a man, simple as salt. Pure material, without metaphor.
SUMMER
Onie and I were walking from the Vale of Cashmere onward into Park Slope. We were talking about gender without a destination, an event that doesn’t end, talking against narratives of “I always knew,” the strict stories we’d had to tell to doctors, psychiatrists,
parents. She said gender is a faith. There was doubt. Holy doubt, glorious doubt.
God burrowed in my calf. I swaddled a dove and laid it down for the coyote. I stretched my arms above my chest in the locker room. I carried doubt with me like a psalm. I sang doubt with the choir. “Wanting is wanting what one cannot.” I kept on wanting.
What belonged to me was not language, but physicality and sensation, internal and collective. Just the same, the God I participated in couldn’t be staked out in the language we had. What was His, what was mine, was stolen, secret, was a string of garlands between us. I could pull on the string, and you could feel it twitch.
So language fails, faith fails, gender fails, we know. We live in the hollow center of those failures, the cesspool that drips out into word.
(from Onie)
Wet robins. Cricket chiming in the locker room. Sweat slipping down my neck. River and I sat in Domino Park and watched the lit squares of the subway scroll over the Williamsburg Bridge. They
had just broken up with their partner of four years and were newly in love with that lover who sent them the moths months earlier, but they were flirting around saying I love you. We talked about wanting stability, though it wasn’t possible—I said I wanted to be solid as stone—no, as flexible as water—I couldn’t decide. At the beach, James and I floated on the perfectly still Atlantic, watched the gulls dive, and talked about grace—he was talking about God, I was talking about movement.
Amara and James broke up. Hazel and James were in love. Amara and Hazel were falling in love. I was falling in love with James. Amara was pulling further away from me. I wanted to fix everything. The elongated creature of us was splitting back into separate and lonelier animals.
On the fourth of July, Amara and I took a bath together. I said I was scared she was touching me without love. She asked if she could touch me instead with utility. I wanted to be patient, to wait for her to come back to me. But distance rolled in like a fog and stayed the whole summer. There were glimpses of closeness, but sometimes that closeness was just another utility.
The distance between us grew wider and more terrifying and more familiar. The past unburied itself. Stranger above me. The past crawled out to eat. I went to the doctor—there was blood in the water, an ache below the stomach, skin torn. The distance split further, between wanting and not wanting.
I joked that if someone held me for three minutes around things resurfacing from my childhood, maybe it would heal me. Amara scoffed, said, “No, it wouldn’t,” said, “You just want me to be your caretaker.”
The dogwood rubbed its wings together, sang.
I walked the same route in the park every day five days a week for a year. I stood at the pond’s edge one day, and the phragmites were taller than me. When did this happen? I stood there staring at the collapse of time passing.
The starlings squawked distinctly. A birder told me, “They’re practicing being starlings.” They croaked back and forth all morning. Even the starlings were fake, I learned. According to the folklore of birders, starlings and house sparrows were first introduced by Eugene Schieffelin in the hopes of including all of the birds mentioned by Shakespeare in Central Park. Now they’re considered pests, known to fly in swarms, spread diseases, and displace native species. They’re named invasives, though most invasive species were intentionally brought to the U.S. and proliferated by colonizers.
Both Japanese knotweed and lesser celandine—two of the most abundant invasive species on the East Coast—were introduced by colonizers as ornamental garden plants for wealthy estates. The language often stages weeds as foreign fugitives, escaping fertile and threatening. Two men, Hall and Hogg, brought over kudzu for the first world’s fair in Philadelphia and by the early 1900s, the U.S. government paid farmers to plant the vine for erosion control and livestock feed. More than a million acres were planted as a result. Now trees fall onto the highway from the extreme heft of the overtaking vine. The colonizer gets to play out his greatest fantasy, his fear of being colonized.
to keep: to seize (from late Old English cepan)
A thin red string at a motorized speed could slice through months of patience and growth, harboring and climbing. The soil was shifting under my feet, curling with new worms, seeded with blue porcelain.
Invasives were an easy enemy, an allocation of funds for environmentalism that didn’t require any disruption to profit or resource extraction. How could we steward public land owned by a private corporation, presided over by a CEO, tilled by volunteers from BlackRock and Lockheed on their annual corporate outings? How could we tend to acres that were once a neighborhood, a land of many hills, a gathering place, now scarred over thick with a park posing as Nature?
Introduced species can displace the millenia-long relationships between flora and fauna indigenous to the area, but overlooked is adaptation, the replenishing of dirt beside the highway through some generations of hardy weeds, and the inherent uncertainty of the “native” and “non-native” border. For centuries before colonization, Indigenous people intentionally moved and introduced plants to new areas—practices that largely contributed to determining plants’ contemporary “native ranges.”
I worked inside my twenty acres of choices. I moved in favor of a world made up wholly of habitat, good landings, good nutrients. I pulled out the monocultures when I could. I planted for insects over the eye. Taking from the bounty, I smoked mugwort before bed. My dreams stretched into wider fields, tufted at the ends. Knotweed hardened bamboo-like, and I cut it into chimes.
River told me they took a tour from members of the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lenape Nation in Inwood Park. They learned
how the Lenape would tie limbs of trees down to shape their growth, how over many years, their limbs would turn to arrows, pointing toward a desired path, mostly, towards water. The group walked through Inwood together and pointed to the trees made into symbols, the trees that two hundred years later still said, “This way.”
In the break room, another groundskeeper told me about ginkgo trees. The ginkgo is a living fossil, dating back possibly all the way to the Permian period, 270 million years ago, predating dinosaurs and flowering plants. The first ever evidence of insect pollination captured in amber contained pollen from a ginkgo tree. It survived in China through the Ice Age and was later cultivated by Buddhist monks for over a thousand years.
The first ginkgo tree in the modern U.S. can be traced to one man, William Hamilton, who brought a cutting from Japan to plant in his garden in Philadelphia in 1784. But about fifty years later, a forest of petrified ginkgo trees was discovered in Washington. The tree existed for millions of years in the northern hemisphere of Pangaea, though they were entirely wiped out by the Ice Age and floods. An old world tree blooms again in North America after millions of years of environmental catastrophe and continental drift.
Ginkgos remember a one-island world, a precolonial world, the careful hands of monks, the weight of berries breaking a whole branch down, and women collecting the fallen fruit at the close of summer.
Amara and I broke up, and I couldn’t help but still sleep in her bed that night. The next morning, the city flooded. I was working. My
dad texted me saying it was the heaviest rainfall since New York City started measuring rainfall. Trees stood in new lakes. I opened my eyes, and it was the end of a world. I waited for the new one to start, but it just poured, and I just watched.
A couple walked with their six-year old son. The mother said, “You said your heart burns underneath your heart? Can you show me where it hurts?” The boy just circled his chest with his finger.
James and I went to the compline by candlelight service again for the first time since the last time we went in spring, and afterwards, we smashed Modelo bottles in Prospect Park from a high rock. I said I was cashing in on a debt, having picked up so many pieces of glass in the past year. I sat down in the dark woods after. I felt like there was something broken at the very center of me, and no one could reach it, and no one would ever want to. He put his arms around me and handed me a piece of chocolate.
When I told Ivan about this core of me, he said, “Well, I’m reaching in there. I’m wriggling my hands around in there.” I laughed into the phone, said, “Nooo, stop it,” like he was tickling me. He said, “I’m gonna take all these pieces and glue them into something stupid, and you can’t do anything about it.” He made a giraffe. I was mad, I didn’t want a giraffe at the center of me. I broke it again and made a bird instead.
to keep: to preserve (something) without loss or change, to last without spoiling (late 14c.)
I found a tiny doll a week after the flood. It was on top of the dirt, a place I’d walked over a hundred times. A friend who was an antique doll collector told me that according to the numbers on the back, it was made before 1915. A coworker said it must be from
erosion, all that flooding washed out the soil and there she was, a hundred year old face at my feet. I thought about how old she was, how old she wasn’t.
Elle sat on my bed, and we drank the same wine we had a year ago—we had hardly seen each other since then, only flit by once or twice. She had just broken up with her fiancé, and she was slowly moving her things out of his house. I told her I was surprised when I first heard she was getting married, said she was such a free bird, who could pin her down? She smiled, said she needed to hear that. Her fiancé had been possessive—she hadn’t seen most of her friends in a year. Every day after, for months, Elle and I texted each other, “good morning freebird,” “goodnight freebird.”
I started to see God in the passage of time. The width of that void widened forever, and He was there throughout. Time passed, and there was God in the reeds when you weren’t looking, in the collapsing bruise of love. Of course there was God in the inevitability of loss and transformation. God was an electric jolt, then an attempt to believe it. A revelation, a full-body shiver, a pervasive doubt, a full-body desire. I tried to hold onto it, let it steer me.
While restoring a mausoleum in Green-Wood Cemetery, James told me about a corner where he was pouring concrete, but the hole behind the gap was too big to be filled. He had to paste over the joint superficially. It held well enough, even through the rain. He told me about trying to plug the hole that was actually a whole room deep on the other side, and I thought about care, how sometimes it felt like it just couldn’t reach, just couldn’t fill.
I thought about how when I was building stairs in the Sierras a few summers earlier, the soil was desert dry at 11,000 feet elevation, and my boss told me that any pinch of dirt I dug out was displaced forever. What you took out had been woven together for decades, centuries, was scarce and frail. You had to get a bigger rock or
crush in the backspace with smaller rocks, you couldn’t just pack the dirt back in, you couldn’t uncarve the earth.
Sometimes at night, just before I fell asleep, I could see it: a perfect circle inside a perfect circle. I slept like a pufferfish alone inside its ritual, and I could feel briefly sealed, flood-safe.
And one day, it was there: against the will of any living thing, and at the same time, taking the will of every living thing to reach it: another world. The leaves fell again.