water.
The landscape sighs,
breathes with the gardener
who stands back,
fists on hips.
Climbing the American Metal Playground Slide
I am the groove in the “R” at the center
rolling forward, narrative ornate
because I have repainted my primer
of private history emerald green,
replacing the rust-red grit I inherited. . .
though it might only be rouge,
a ruse of erudition over ignorance,
making rubies from the affairs
of faith and farms. I trace the space
between the dirt and my fingertips anyway,
as if to lift the elements of my ribs
from their fissures, a superficial rinse,
surface shimmer. The root of my fruit
is still bruised at the base of the tree.
This rhetoric of theology follows me, I am
swallowed in iambs of nursery rhymes
and grace, grandmother of forgiveness
who handed me the caramel-coated apple
and said eat all the way to the seed.
The remaining core is this verse I climb,
every rung branching back
to our revolutionaries. This earth
is ours, its harvest, its rot. This ladder
has our dirt tucked between the crevices
of every letter. I reach and reach,
polish whatever skin I can and trip
over the broken treads, all repeat
American, American, American,
until I reach the peak and slide, hot metal burning.
Ohio
I. Against the Ground
I was wheat-field flat and growing
into rolling foothills. Somewhere in me
were illuminated cities waiting for dawn,
but my factory towns slipped into dusk,
their single-panes broken against mid-day light.
I did not see myself deciduous,
shedding cherry blossoms like wilted promises.
The spruce with its blush of blue growth
led me to believe I was evergreen, but even that
cannot withstand six months of winter salt, of ash.
Snow melts before it hits the earth
as rain in a season I pretend is spring
because the crocus and daffodil return
and the factories churn out shopping marts
and parking lots filled with rusted pick-up trucks.
I wait, perched on my steel I-beam,
for the college students to come home,
but it is spring, and the frost returns to kill the buds
before they’ve bloomed. The Earth turns,
pushes fieldstones into my hands for harvest
before the plow restores the hollowed stalks
of last year’s crop into the dirt. Earthworms
labor alongside the farmer who toils
against the ground, ready for the slow shiver
of crops, slow billow of hope.
II. Soup of the Day
I only knew the many ways to cook
zucchini because there was so much of it
and I was tired
of fried, tired of bread, tired of grilled.
I do not sauté; I sauce, I boil, I butter and boy,
my boys grow tall.
But now I am old. Unyielding. I do not produce
as much food as I used to. My fields are named
suburban neighborhoods.
I eat the meat of other states and export
grain-fed college kids. I do not know
how to behave
in this marketplace, how to diversify my menu,
integrate new ingredients. Entrees remain the same.
I do not change.
III. Histories
I hold my histories
like apologies,
named the river Cuyahoga and walk
a crooked path past Flats
of abandoned restaurants, wander
Geauga County trapping
the raccoon here
and releasing it there,
out of sight,
trace the large creek that meanders
the southern border, utter Ohio
and do not know or remember
the Seneca Indians
would not have added “river”
