Before I breathed
A young man held my mother
coaxed her with unpracticed grace
from Irish Catholic garments between
rough sheets that smelled
like carpentry and dirt.
In photographs from back then
we have the same wrinkled eyebrows,
the same reddish beards,
but different creases
kissing the corners of our eyes.

There are canyons in my knuckles
carved out by cold.
Not New Mexico cracks
in too-hot soil,
but staff-lines of the song
New England skin sings—
I cannot deny I was born here.

My father wears gloves now when he works outside
Says he never used to, but
the pain maybe got too much
Too many winters laying palms flat
against elm, ash, sycamore,
feeling for a pulse
counting on his wrist,
waiting for a murmur, subtle hush
in the rhythm;
telling symptom
of a faulty valve.

I work weekends at a veterinary clinic
and the doctor there does this, too,
though sometimes, being held,
cats purr too loud to listen
and I must reach across the room
and turn the handle on the faucet;
Most cats fear water.

Well Father, I cannot drink from the soil
and I do not always land on my feet
But father, listen to my heartbeat
Put your hand on my chest
and don’t fear as my body
creaks in the wind—

Hear it?

Father
My boughs, my winter-catchers
are thin, but
it is not root-rot, moth, parasite;
I am not felled
like the beard you hacked from your chin
the day you decided to love, to suffer
the rest of your life
with that Irish Catholic girl—
This is merely my first season.
Brush the snow from my shoulders.

Please
comfort me
quietly,
like skin,
cracking:
“My son
my sapling
you’ll grow.”

Walker Staples 15 March 2013

the ecosystem that young children
wake up on Tuesdays
before dawn to try & save
treading muddy gray roadsides
spiriting away cigarette butts
faded azure beer cans
thin shopping bag ghosts
with tiny gloved hands—
this cracking frost-heave
pavement landscape
is my body

my body is the first gasping crocus
the first chanting insects,
the first murdered fieldmouse
after waking

is the first meal
of a young owl,
all fluff and down and bone,
high in a skinny birch tree
and still a-feared of foxes

my body is hot loam
is fevered asphalt
is a feeding garden
& my soul…

my soul
is the beating sun,
undecayed, though tarnished
by weeks
maybe months
behind curtains of Winter

my soul separate
from my body
for so long…
and yet

it could have dined with God
and married His Daughter
before anyone thought to go looking

Never forget
there is poetry in dirt
in greens, in beets,
especially in rutabagas.
Three-dollar-a-bag spinach,
you are a symphony of compost
with which an old man’s teeth are smitten;
Rosemary sprig, beneath all your flavor
you are the staff-lines of a madrigal written
in loving anticipation of the mason jars, weighed down with water
where you will grow and swell and bud and spread out strong purple flowers which elate
that you are part of a song
which sings every year
a little louder.

My beautiful, daredevil vegetables,
This coming September, I will miss you dearly.
I will be days of travel away from your world of roots, of mist,
of six-in-the-morning-before-classes tonic of rain
which saturates my skin so good I’m surprised when I shake the dirt from the leeks
all over my bare feet, that you don’t crop up green & white from between my toes,
that my arms don’t grow heavy with peppers
after they cake with jalapeno & bell seeds from all the half-rotten miracles
to whom I have given baptism in shallow plastic tubs of water
floating like elations of fire
in the grayness of the morning.

Know how to tell if a pepper’s rotten? Wash it & shake it
& if you can hear the water swishing inside,
if you can make a maraca of its innards,
then give it back to the dirt.

This is the wisdom of peppers:
when you grow soft
when you have been chosen
& plucked,
& washed
& thoroughly loved
& shaken,

when you have called out like fire
beside your brothers in a basin,

lay down in the compost
the kindly compost,
& listen, just listen,
(there will be nothing left to do
but listen)

to the poetry of dirt.

Scuttle, little fingers!
Peck out permanences
like finches
kissing.

Follow your nerves,
little heart-endings—
Oh, you are the scores
left by gentle rain
on the piques of small mountains

& resurrection ferns
brushing shoulders
with each other

& lovers
walking.

*3 May, 2013