I wanted to write...

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.