a blog about the asparagus. Here's what came out- my first poem in ten years.
Transplantation
I.
Nothing but slick leaf litter on
the gravel road
we drove the pickup cautiously
down, 5 gallon
buckets of corms nestled among
shovels and garden forks.
Tools loosened this black dirt
packed tight inside 1x12 boards
that used to be a garden bed, wood
rotten
enough to crumble in our hands. The
soil held
fast to itself, a tight rectangle
formed from years of threadlike
roots weaving themselves
crosshatched through compost.
We scent this like animals, our
work‘s done on hands
and knees or stretched flat,
bellies against the cool damp.
These corms are tangled,
intertwined, we work in past our wrists,
fingers pricked and torn by long
forgotten ratwire stretched tight
under all the beds years ago in hope of thwarting
ground squirrels and voles
tunneling under fencing to decimate
tender young beans and lettuce. I
learned at first harvest the discordance
between ratwire and root
vegetables, but never disturbed these asparagus,
the wire underneath them
forgotten till they outgrew their restraints.
until this morning, when we become
the tunnelers, burrowing
under sharp wire and around the
twisted roots of trees
long gone, these roots that keep
on even though
there’s no tree waiting for the
nourishment they send back.
They don’t stop, nor do we,
disentangling corms that
weave together so tightly they
appear at first as one lone
giant entity, torn from the ghost
of a bad horror movie,
alien in our hands.
II.
Back home in town, our new home,
soon to be the final
resting place for these
asparagus, a bed made one last time.
I’d like to claim we dug the old
bed out to save the corms, but
honestly I wanted some small
piece of mountain here, just
a bit of height in this low lying
yard, a lot that’s sited
so far down the city placed town
culverts in our lawn. A beautiful
asparagus bed’s situated in the
garden, two foot high sides, corms spaced
precisely so and dirt-covered
just the way the chart inside their box specified.
But these aren’t city plants
we’re bringing down the mountain, though they
may have started out inside
restricted quarters they didn’t remain that way,
their escape from captivity began
long before we happened by
to aid in their emancipation.
They can’t go back into a bed, re-placed
in with tame plants, ordered rows
inside a stricture now they’ve wilded,
we plant them accordingly, dig up
stray patches- in the garden,
in the yard, a few plants by the
kiwi, some where the tomatoes used to be,
another group around the corner nestled
by black raspberry.
I’ll try not to remember where we
put them,
like I try to forget home, hope
that next spring I’ll have a yard
full of surprise, feast of House
Mountain, rising.
