Umbel
Carrots appreciate their garden shyly
in a cortical, dendritic way. The Nantes
takes its time to harden into fondness, two years’
food stored in a taproot, plunged into the dirt,
knife-straight, two years before the real work
of nutlet and umbel begins. The Chantenay,
Danvers, Oxheart as they ripen are as useless as
Queen Anne’s Lace, can only hope to become
cambium, by not drawing attention.
For them, ripeness is everything. But a garden
is mostly like this: all of it happening too soon,
the impulse, urgency, the wind ruffling
a frilly rosette, dark dirt sliding off, the root
pulled up and up into unimaginable light.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks and is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for The Mercy of Traffic, (2019.) Read more.