I'm putting together my ASLE paper, and I've been casting about for poems to talk about. I've picked three. The idea is that I use a handout and have the people refer to these pieces so I don't have to read them--and take up precious argument time--or refer to them in an airy, "I'm sure you all know them" way. You, you lucky people, get an early look.
The Subject of Gardening
-Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Red Clay Suite
With sharecropper sorrow,
my mother looks at the empty field,
tells you a hard story, I don’t care
what they’re trying to grow here now.
All that there used to be cotton
and it won’t give them nothing else.
Once, I labored in the garden with this woman,
her hands gritty, line of soil under her nails.
I was a careless girl loving the edible
smell of turned dirt. And who was that child
holding the grasshopper cupped in a palm?
Who made fun of beetles’ frantic scrabbling?
These days I won’t listen to the bent-backed
message in my mother’s voice.
She’ll tell me she found the road’s end
but don’t ask how she stumbled there.
I find it hard to go outside in the heat,
to keep the jade alive in its indoor pot,
to heap apologies on the browning edges,
to lay me down beside the truth of this land.
Praise
-Jimmy Santiago Baca, Black Mesa Poems
From Isleta Pueblo church
evening mass bells bellow.
Trembling gray wheat stubble,
thrashing brittle bamboo and cattails,
crackling pasture grass,
the notes trample, up Black Mesa,
down Black Mesa, great horses
dragging boulders away, their breath
the sunset that explodes
red cloud dust on the West Mesa.
Blackbirds
sing from tattered hymn books
of cottonwood branches.
Beneath them I gaze up
to their ancient altar of wood,
black-robed monks
faithful, making a pure offering of love
to the light, in one great orchestrated
lift their wings beat a black cloud
that glides over fields, spirals and swoops,
incense from an earth censor
swung by an altar boy, smoke of their flight
fills church the field is.
Syzygy
-Arthur Sze, Quipu
I notice headlight out the living-room window
then catch the bass in a pickup as it drives by.
I am shocked to learn that doctors collected
the urine of menopausal nuns in Italy to extract
gonadotropins. And is that what one draws,
in infinitesimal dose, out of a vial?
I remember a steel-wool splinter in my finger
and how difficult it was to discern, extract
under a magnifying glass; yet—blue mold,
apple dropping from branch—it is hard to see
up close when, at the periphery, the unexpected
easily catches the eye. Last Thursday night,
we looked through binoculars at the full moon,
watched it darken and darken until, eclipsed,
it glowed ferrous-red. By firelight, we glowed;
my fingertips flared when I rubbed your shoulders,
softly bit your ear. The mind is a tuning fork
that we strike, and, struck, in the syzygy
of a moment, we find the skewed, tangled
passions of a day begin to straighten, align, hum.
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