Читать книгу Pruning Burning Bushes - Sarah M. Wells - Страница 11

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”

to the end, just Ohio.