In this quiet second-person meditation, the speaker describes the mood that can settle over a gardener while pulling morning glory roots from the earth. The work is repetitive and physical: wrists caked in clay, back stooped, mind turning distant and glum. Even the beauty of the place—the red barn, irises, maples, lilacs, geese, ducks, blooming pear trees—cannot interrupt the nagging thought that comes with each troweled bit of soil. When the sun appears, the feeling eases a little, but not entirely. She goes inside to a late cold lunch, silent and stooped, because language cannot capture what the cold ground has just said to her hands. The mood is weary and earthy, touched by a quiet recognition that some kinds of knowledge come only through physical labor and cannot be spoken.
Sometimes — Summary
this is what you'll come to, picking about in earth, pulling morning glory roots like long white worms and heaping them beside you of a morning: you will become distant and glum, and as your wrists dry up, caked in clay, you'll look around you, and not your small red barn, your irises, your bamboo patch, your oak and ash, your three brave maples rattling in the breeze, your small house bracketed in lilacs, breathing smoke, your woodshed stacked roof-high, your mint and parsley putting on new life, your geese, your ducks, your pear trees in bright bloom will rid you of the thought of what this is that you are digging, bit by troweled bit.
Assuming the sun will come out, which now it does, things won't seem quite that bad, and yet you will walk stooped, with furrowed brow, into the house for a late cold lunch without words, for there are no words to share what it was the cold ground said to your hands just now.