Vegetable Garden Sonnets
1. Anticipation
Under many moons the field’s surface ripples, mimicking
the way age shapes its waves on skin, loose footing for a crow.
Through the days and nights since seeds were handed down
and lowered under ground, in silence but for the wash of wind and rain,
the slight and grassy shoots balloon upward and out until they’re thick
as bamboo. Each kernel’s fine umbilical cord will be joined to the others,
gathered into a single tassel of silk that pours through the slim opening
in the corona, the husk a papery origami folded over the ear
of corn inside. Above, tall red clusters will lift their lashes
starward. Beside the rows of growing shafts, beyond the edge
of the field and the season and the ripening, and under the denser
shade of trees and under the spell of yellow, silver, green, stalk
the raccoons, who wait all year, year after year, not knowing
that they do, not remembering what they’re waiting for,
but knowing that they want it.
2. Generation
Counterclockwise, spiraling stems up
their guides with triplicate leaves alongside,
tracking the trajectory of daylight’s daily
victory over the rein of gravity,
the vines of green beans climb: drape
a loose one leftward toward its support:
in its own gentle tantrum it twists away,
backs off, acrobatic: serpentine, insists on scaling
space, sparring, trailing the slow cycle
of the sphere that spins its rise . . . offspring,
compass, time traveler: curvature that turns
as the North Star to the pole, turns now against it,
each fresh vine surpasses the finite: arrow
arcing airward, oblivious of its roots earthbound.
3. Devotion
Under the invisible celebration of green and small spiked
fingers, spread, delicate, flat and curved like flame
Under the tender stems indented like the one deceptive wheel
of the unicycle designed for riding the high wire
Under the rim of soil in its raised bed, the horizon
of soil that skims and covers the protected and the hidden
Under the weather, under pressure, under our own soles:
the cooled carrots fatten—
after all this time of clinging
To the source, their soft color’s lifted off the earth, their cling
so easily loosened with a single circular twist:
And then in that moment, and then, for another moment,
the dumb, intimate dirt
Embraces the shape of the carrot, embraces the place
of its absence in the ground
Alice Fogel was New Hampshire’s poet laureate 2014-2019. Read more.
“Vegetable Garden Sonnets” was first published in Be That Empty.