Composting, Caprilands Herb Farm |
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This poem originated in a conversation with my neighbor.
She was talking about soil, but I misheard her.
The first six inches of soul are where all
the life is. You don’t have to dig very far.
Peels, eggshells, table scraps transmute from
food into food, for worms, for whatever you
plant. You have to stir it, but don’t dredge up
clay from deep underneath or you’ll just create
hardpan. Think about trees: how shed leaves
transmigrate into new ground year after year.
You stand at the base of an oak, four hundred
years old, its spring-blushed buds flickering
sun, roots flexing like elbows and knees
before they push down into earth. You heard
that she’d died, the owner of this place,
a goat farm she’d bought early in the Great
Depression. One summer when everything
else died by drought, she came to see wisdom
in herbs. It’s said that she took their survival
as a sign, planted them by color and theme:
silver, Shakespeare, magenta, stars. She’s here
at your feet—buried under this tree—her
ashes mixing with dirt, marked by a post
carved with runes. Some of the locals used to
call her a witch. After all, she dressed as she
pleased, her white hair unruly and wild. She
frequented her gardens in the dark, every year
erected a Maypole, and with the women
in her employ, she danced, braiding ribboned
blossoms loosely around the tall oak mast. Who
knows what they uttered, what incantations, if
they’d all signed Satan’s book. After all, she
grew boneset and devil’s claw, stinging nettle
and witch hazel, and in her old age she married
a much younger man. After all, the farm was
but two hundred miles from Salem, where once
if a woman’s cow fell ill, she’d blame the woman
next door whose garden thrived better than hers,
name her neighbor lest she herself be named.
So long ago, you tell yourself, before they knew
anything of bacteria or biology. It was simple:
if the accused claimed innocence, she’d be
hanged. Confess, and she might be spared. Like
the blacklists, whose long fingers pointed across
backyard gardens, toward buried fallout shelters.
Or now, when prayer facing Mecca is all that it
takes to force registration, deportation, and jail.
You stand at the base of this oak, try to decipher
the runes that mark where she lies, composting
at your feet. You ask her to give you an omen,
a gesture, she who was intimate with seasons.
And just as you ask, your head bowed with
the weight of this world, she speaks from her
six inches of soul: a bird blasts from the tree’s
topmost branches—you swear it’s a dove--
streaking like a sun-paled comet into sky.
Published in CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Summer, 2009
Note: I wrote this poem during the George W. Bush administration. I'd hoped it would become outdated, but alas, it has not.
She was talking about soil, but I misheard her.
The first six inches of soul are where all
the life is. You don’t have to dig very far.
Peels, eggshells, table scraps transmute from
food into food, for worms, for whatever you
plant. You have to stir it, but don’t dredge up
clay from deep underneath or you’ll just create
hardpan. Think about trees: how shed leaves
transmigrate into new ground year after year.
You stand at the base of an oak, four hundred
years old, its spring-blushed buds flickering
sun, roots flexing like elbows and knees
before they push down into earth. You heard
that she’d died, the owner of this place,
a goat farm she’d bought early in the Great
Depression. One summer when everything
else died by drought, she came to see wisdom
in herbs. It’s said that she took their survival
as a sign, planted them by color and theme:
silver, Shakespeare, magenta, stars. She’s here
at your feet—buried under this tree—her
ashes mixing with dirt, marked by a post
carved with runes. Some of the locals used to
call her a witch. After all, she dressed as she
pleased, her white hair unruly and wild. She
frequented her gardens in the dark, every year
erected a Maypole, and with the women
in her employ, she danced, braiding ribboned
blossoms loosely around the tall oak mast. Who
knows what they uttered, what incantations, if
they’d all signed Satan’s book. After all, she
grew boneset and devil’s claw, stinging nettle
and witch hazel, and in her old age she married
a much younger man. After all, the farm was
but two hundred miles from Salem, where once
if a woman’s cow fell ill, she’d blame the woman
next door whose garden thrived better than hers,
name her neighbor lest she herself be named.
So long ago, you tell yourself, before they knew
anything of bacteria or biology. It was simple:
if the accused claimed innocence, she’d be
hanged. Confess, and she might be spared. Like
the blacklists, whose long fingers pointed across
backyard gardens, toward buried fallout shelters.
Or now, when prayer facing Mecca is all that it
takes to force registration, deportation, and jail.
You stand at the base of this oak, try to decipher
the runes that mark where she lies, composting
at your feet. You ask her to give you an omen,
a gesture, she who was intimate with seasons.
And just as you ask, your head bowed with
the weight of this world, she speaks from her
six inches of soul: a bird blasts from the tree’s
topmost branches—you swear it’s a dove--
streaking like a sun-paled comet into sky.
Published in CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Summer, 2009
Note: I wrote this poem during the George W. Bush administration. I'd hoped it would become outdated, but alas, it has not.
