Anyone who has followed a recipe knows the voice of the second half of "Planting sang": brisk, practical, a little bossy. Plant the berries as soon as they arrive. Make a hole with your index finger. Cover it up. Yet the instructions keep slipping into something stranger, and the poem is really about that slippage, the way a small gardening chore turns into a ritual about time, death and the body.
"Sang" is a regional word for ginseng, and the poem never says the longer name. Judging by the imagery, though, the plant is clearly ginseng: the "wrinkled homunculus" of a root, the "blood-colored berry," the seeds that sit underground for "twenty months." The title does a second job as well. "Sang" is also the past tense of "sing," so the opening line, "Sing a song of sang," plays on the nursery rhyme "Sing a song of sixpence." The jingle sets up a childlike, charmed tone, and the poem then pulls that tone toward something older and darker.
The first stanza's central image is the seed as a stone that "finish[es] growing in the ground / as if traveling through the interminable gut / of some great beast that vanished in the Pleistocene." The comparison is the poem's own speculation, not a botanical fact it states. It stretches the seed's slowness across geological time and imagines the planter's patience as an inheritance from creatures long extinct. The enjambment helps. The sentence runs over the line break and keeps going, just as the gut is "interminable." The root itself is "growing slow as thought," a simile that makes the plant seem to be thinking its way toward the surface, one sluggish idea at a time.
Against all this slowness comes hurry. The berries are "a tempting prize for mold," so they must go into the ground the moment they arrive by "overnight mail." The mundane detail of the plastic vial and the courier sits oddly beside the Pleistocene, and the poem enjoys the clash. The last line of the stanza, "don't put it off till after supper," is the plainest in the poem, almost comic, and it quietly introduces appetite. Food, rot and hunger are all competing for the same berry.
The second stanza turns that appetite into something sacred. The poem has no rhyme and no steady meter, though the opening line comes close to a loose iambic pentameter, and the free lines let the instructions move at a walking pace. "Moving slowly through the woods & stopping often" is itself a slow line, with its soft consonants and its ampersand standing in for "and." Then comes the poem's boldest instruction: "Pretend you're burying a grandparent, piece by piece." The berries become remains, and the planter becomes a mourner. Kinship is already built into the root's human shape, so the leap feels earned. The "blood-colored berry" confirms it. Planting here means burying, and burying is a way of hoping.
The final couplet-like pair of lines is the richest. "Pray for uninterrupted sleep, & an end to sleep" holds two wishes that seem to contradict each other. The seed needs its long dormancy undisturbed, yet it also needs to wake and sprout. The same words can be read about the dead, who are asked to rest and also, perhaps, to return. The poem leaves that doubleness unresolved.
The last line, "Let your stomach rumble, soft & low," sends us back to the beast's gut in the first stanza. The planter is now the creature, a body with its own hunger and its own slow digestion, carrying the seed a little further. The sound is also the poem's quietest music, the low murmur of a body that has been kneeling in the woods past suppertime.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. In twenty lines, ordinary instructions become a small funeral and a nod to deep time, and the human body is shown as part of the same cycle as the root. The poem never lectures about patience or mortality. It simply tells you where to put your finger and how deep to dig, and by then you have understood.