Thirteen lines, thirteen words (one per line, with two exceptions), one complete revolution. The poem is a list, and the list is a wheel. Each word is a station on the cycle, and the reader moves through them the way a season moves through a garden: forward, downward, under, up again.

The first four words trace the ascending arc: Birth, Growth, Sustenance, Gifting Life. The progression is botanical and biographical simultaneously—a seed germinates (birth), a plant develops (growth), the plant produces food or beauty (sustenance), and the mature organism gives what it has to others (gifting life). Applied to a human life, the same four words describe childhood, development, productivity, and generosity. The verb “Gifting” is the only gerund in the ascending arc, and its active form suggests that giving life is not a state but an ongoing act—the garden (or the person) is always in the process of gifting, never finished with it.

The descent begins with “Dwindling”—another gerund, mirroring “Gifting” but now describing diminishment rather than generosity. The plant is still alive but contracting, losing mass, losing color. “Spent” follows: the energy is exhausted, the season’s work is done, the fruit has been given. But then—”But happy / Satisfied”—the poem interrupts its own decline with two words of emotional resolution. The “But” is the poem’s only conjunction and its most important structural pivot: it refuses to let the decline be tragic. The garden is spent but not bitter, finished but not empty. Satisfaction arrives not despite the spending but because of it—the garden is happy precisely because it gave everything away.

“Return to earth” is the poem’s death, stated without euphemism or drama. The spent organism falls, decomposes, rejoins the soil it grew from. “Decay” follows—the process that sounds like destruction but is actually preparation: organic matter breaking down into the nutrients the next cycle will need. “Nutrition” completes the transformation: decay becomes food, death becomes sustenance, the ending becomes the beginning’s raw material.

“Rebirth” closes the organic cycle, and “Ad Infinitum” closes the poem by refusing to close the cycle. The Latin phrase—”to infinity”—converts the garden’s seasonal revolution into a permanent condition: this has happened before, will happen again, and will never stop happening. The phrase also elevates the poem from the specific (one garden, one season) to the universal (all gardens, all seasons, all lives, all deaths, all rebirths, forever).

The poem connects to the catalog’s garden thread (“Your OCD,” “A Garden is an Art Form,” “Barefoot in the Grass,” the horticultural imagery throughout) but strips the metaphor to its skeleton. No flowers are named, no colors described, no Muse invoked. The garden is not a setting for a love poem but an argument about existence itself: everything that lives will spend itself, return to earth, decay into nutrition, and begin again. The poem is a creed stated in thirteen words.

The catalog’s most radically compressed poem—thirteen lines, essentially thirteen words, and a complete cosmology. The one-word-per-line structure gives each term the weight of a chapter title, a station of the cross, a bead on a rosary. The reader moves through the cycle the way a finger moves along a prayer strand: one word, one breath, one stage, forward. The ascending arc (Birth through Gifting Life) and the descending arc (Dwindling through Decay) are symmetrical in length but asymmetrical in tone, and the asymmetry is the poem’s emotional intelligence: the ascent is straightforward and expected, but the descent is interrupted by “But happy / Satisfied,” which refuses the decline’s expected gravity. The “But” is the poem’s bravest word—a two-letter conjunction that defies the trajectory of an entire cosmological system. Without it, the cycle is merely biological; with it, the cycle is philosophical: spending yourself completely is not loss but fulfillment. “Return to earth” is the poem’s plainest and most dignified line—no metaphor, no euphemism, just the fact of organic matter going home. The progression from Decay through Nutrition to Rebirth is the poem’s most scientifically precise sequence: decomposition releases nutrients, nutrients feed new growth, new growth is rebirth. The biology is accurate, and the accuracy gives the metaphysics its credibility. “Ad Infinitum” is the perfect closing—two Latin words that convert the finite cycle into the infinite, the seasonal into the eternal. Where the poem’s compression is both its power and its limitation: at thirteen words, the reader must supply all the imagery, all the context, all the emotional shading. The poem provides a skeleton and trusts the reader to dress it. Some readers will find the bones sufficient; others will want to see the garden. But the poem’s argument is that the skeleton is the garden—stripped to its essential structure, the cycle reveals itself most clearly. A poem that proves you can fit forever in thirteen words.