Earth
You see a woman of a certain age,
not old, yet seeing every sign
of how the world will age her.
More and more, you’ll find her in the garden
but not for onions or potatoes.
She wants blooms, color,
a breaking in the earth’s disorder.
Swollen branch, the right bird—
they can make her cry. And the fussing
over moving this or that to the right location.
Learning to be alone,
she brings out ten varieties of rose,
armed against pest or blight
and the cutting northern cold
she fights with blankets of dirt.
Earliest spring will find her hovering
over the waxy perfection of tulips, the ones
closest to the thawing ground.
You’d think it’s the opening she loves,
the loosening flower revealing
the meticulous still-life deep in the cup.
But what she needs is to see
those stiff-petaled, utterly still ones
rise out of the dirt.
The weather won’t cooperate. She sinks
hundreds of bulbs in the rain,
mud on her hands, black smear on her neck.
For this birthing, all she pays
is stiff joints, and she knows again
the insistence of flowering.
Falling, she knows the flowers
fall to the season, and the seasons
to the great wheel. Fallen, she’s learned
to prefer the fallen.
CLEOPATRA MATHIS is the author of eight books of poems; the most recent, After the Body: Poems New and Selected, was published by Sarabande Books in 2020. Read more.
“Earth” appears in Guardian (Sheep Meadow Press, 1995).