Courgettes From My Sister’s Garden

Green and bulbous then tapering
to slender pizzles, they are alien fruit
sprouting from pots like open
secrets or the puzzling genitalia
in a surrealist’s landscape. My sister can’t
understand why they turned
out liked that.

We meet once a year, either in Montreal
or Ipswich. This time it’s my turn
to go overseas, picking up the unresolved
conversation as we stroll past beach
huts on the Felixstowe boardwalk. We talk
about how our father used words
like “overseas”, the implication of a point of no
return because one of his brothers had died
in Italy during the war.

I position the courgettes on the kitchen
counter, take a picture
with my iPod and post it on Facebook,
beseeching my gardening homies
for any info on why these courgettes
would turn out
so misshapen, so comically vulgar, so
utterly devoid of hope and meaning.

The beach huts are different colours
and have quaint names, like “Davy Jones’
Locker” and “Quebec”. Talk turns to our mother’s
manic depression and my vague memories
of her and I on a holiday. How she met
a man who bought me a wagon. How
they enjoyed talking, the white terry cloth
robe he wore on the hotel’s patio and the Bloody
Marys our mother drank. Like bits
of a remembered dream. My sister fills in
spaces, tries to put things
in context. Then remembers a show on BBC 2
she taped for us to watch, a retrospective
on Davy Jones’ career called, “Before
And After The Monkees”.

These horribly deformed courgettes will live
forever on Facebook, along with
wiseass comments about green
Martian penises, commiserating comments
about epic gardening fails, informed
comments about a lack
of pollination as the possible
reason for their weird shape. I give
the thread a sense of finality
with a comment on how I had seen
a sea-green beach hut
named “Courgette, My Love”.