among the wreckage

With the strong winds blowing everyone's trash into my yard lately I finally got myself on the other side of our excessively high fence and picked through the summer's dry canes, fishing out, let's see, a Macdonald's bag, an empty bag of balloons, plenty of cellophane, along with lots of yellowed newspapers that had molded to the form of the rose bush. It had been awhile. Once in that small plot of earth that packs too much wildness I was surprised to find a small, pale gourd that had dropped off the now shriveled vine, this skeletized poppy pod and half a dozen milk weed pods, as rough and knobby as winter, but through the open slit a dove's breast of the most delicately compressed and staggered softness starting to unleash itself into the air. Does hardness contradict softness, I wonder? At times it is easy to think so.