Summary

A Summer Garden – First person, past tense / several long stanzas, blank verse. Stanza 1: The speaker describes discovering a photograph of (his? her?) mother, “sitting in the sun, her face flushed with achievement or triumph” (64). Dogs and time were both sleeping, the speaker says, as time does in photographs. The speaker describes clearing away the dust, the picture revealing itself, the day in the photograph becoming darker. The speaker describes becoming aware of a word to describe these changes (“blindness or darkness, peril, confusion?") (64), but then quickly disappearing.

Stanza 2: The speaker describes recovering from the encounter with the photograph, and putting it back where it had been found – in the pages of a paperback copy of “Death in Venice,” marked with notes in the margins. Putting the photograph back where it was found (“in case … nothing is an accident”), the speaker notes some words in...