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Dave Bonta
Rain has forsaken us. However much water I give my gardens, it still isn’t enough. Tomato and squash vines wilt. Corn leaves curl. The potatoes gave up altogether, leaving me a half-sized harvest. I feel like the opposite of King Midas: Everything I touch turns to dust. But let me have one wish. I’ll keep it secret even from myself, and carry it back to earth’s ear in a bucket.
sinkholy
fields resting on straw-
thin stalactites
Six weeks after I planted potatoes, they are finally all up, the latest leaves no bigger than the ears of the mice I was sure had dug up and eaten them, especially after a series of holes appeared in each hill. But it’s been unusually cold this spring, and sprouts were simply taking their time. Our neighbors had urged patience, and they were right.
All this waiting to see what happens with the pandemic would be hard to bear if I didn’t also have something to wait for: a garden growing and changing day by day now, so that time doesn’t merely pass like some lifeless assembly line, but unfolds, ramifies, flourishes, bears fruit.
even as
I pull weeds my beard
keeps on growing
evening garden
Over back where they speak of life as staying
(‘You couldn’t call it living, for it ain’t’),
There was an old, old house renewed with paint,
And in it a piano loudly playing.
Out in the ploughed ground in the cold a digger,
Among unearthed potatoes standing still,
Was counting winter dinners, one a hill,
With half an ear to the piano’s vigor.
All that piano and new paint back there,
Was it some money suddenly come into?
Or some extravagance young love had been to?
Or old love on an impulse not to care--
Not to sink under being man and wife,
But get some color and music out of life?
Where are the potatoes, she wondered, watching
Heat shimmer across her corn block, its leaves
Each rustling against other, turning brown.
Right here they were planted, next bed over,
Evenly spaced, in two long lines, eyes up
And covered in soft soil, mixed with compost --
Really exactly as she had done these fifty years.
Early next morning, she reached for her mason's hammer,
The experiment with the spud hook having failed, and
Heaving her old bones down onto her gardening stool
Exactly at the end of that mysterious weedy bed;
Pulled block after block of solid hexagonal clod
Over, busting up each as she went, feeling for
That coolness she knew as round starch balls
All her life she'd depended on. It's not