Bilgungsproprietor
by D.M. Bradford
Slow and funny in the gut, our year of home ownership. Would love to tell itself it's going to be spent being written. Would love to tell itself its lack of poetry is already sidelined and collected. Three weeks moved, what I've got, for now, is this messy folder of cost projections, savings distributions, quoted brickwork, lead paint how-to's, doors and windows and the grade and the stumps into money counted, ins and outs, here and gone. To show for it all, in part: new maple floors, an old marshy grey from the kitchen to the front door, a faulty radiator, and a hundred or so wall anchors left behind. I can't imagine putting a hole in the wall, but I'm ready to learn, same as with all the yard work to wrap our heads around, because we have a yard now. Have does some heavy lifting there. And it's yards, really: out front, two magnolias, saucer and yellow bird. The one flushed pink and icing white, the other lemony green and yellow. The one probably millions of years in the record, the other—Kay looked it up—born in Brooklyn forty years ago. We're told those who planted them thought they were getting two pink ones, but the nursery screwed up and so here we are. Together, they frame the season for my eyes to itch and water, and they really, really do, earlier than they have in forever. A friend says this is when the English go looking for nettles to sting them, but I settle for tea, I settle for half a roll of toilet paper in a blown-out heap, a drill and putty knife off to the side on the cherry tabletop, a 5Ah battery on the charge, a life quite still, and yet not. I settle for Gateau, the grey-blue cat who shits, seemingly exclusively, on the back lawn, our gardener in waiting, who paws at the kitchen door to be sat with and overserved and looked after, slow blink, slow blink back. Mid unplanned hole around a stump, I quit digging, for now, and sit with him in a patch of sunlight. After dinner, Kay and I follow the last bit of day to the front porch to sit with the trees before the pink and white starts to shake offspring, right on the edge of too pretty. Walkers-by stop to take their selfie after their close-up after their video of the blossoming trees. And we can't help but enjoy the privilege, embarrassed. We take our own pictures, too. Your trees are so beautiful, they say, and we act the gracious keepers, having done nothing. I still have no idea how much an electrician's afternoon will cost, but we'll pay for it anyway. Our trees—the strange, lush problem of even just the phrase. Did you know, an admirer volunteers, that they kind of taste like ginger? For the first time, we share a petal from each tree, and it's true. I want to say this all has more to it than that. I want to say a year from now, yet right here, with the snails hyped up and out. Say, a couple of videos of them. Say, you've got to see them go.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Credit: Annie France Noël
Darby Minott Bradford is a poet and translator based in Tio'tia:ke (Verdun). They are the author of Governor General Literary Awards and Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), and Bottom Rail on Top (Brick Books, 2023), which was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Bradford's first translation, House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson (Brick Books, 2023), received the Warland Award and John Glassco Translation Prize, and was shortlisted for the Governor General Literary Awards. Ring of Dust by Louise Marois, Bradford's latest translation, was released in spring 2025.
Instagram: @newportmanteau