Behind the grumpy
Powder-blue rototiller,
Interned in dust and
Shriven by the bloody
Stations of Essex county biting flies
Across my shins,
Hangdog to its blistering
Handles, I level bone-jigging,
Snarling progress against
The fastness of buried roots,
Wheedled stones and
Disobedient hedgerows,
Working the lines at Bothways Farms,
A wind-whipped acreage running away
With the declining light.
Here turned up loam ensconces
Me, black with fertility, a touch,
A labor bordering on
The verbal, in a rot-
Pungent atmosphere both
Suggestive and inarticulate,
Where I can sweatily
Follow through the mental
Seed-death in these trenches
That will raise me up another season,
Baskets heavy with a harvest of words
Equal to the speechless.
Third Cardinal 