Root
At the bottom of the garden In the heart of a blackberry bush Are limbs that do not bleed marrow. Feather bone, iron blood, mind of aether Eyes hold a malignant question The tongue too new to pluck: What was that darkness from which I came? ‘You, apple of the mud Grown from a spore Of my tuberous hide You were planted as balm For the ache that smarted When the figs grew grey and rank. And I knew all your mortal foibles Bred you, earthling, nonetheless— But will you always squint Like an ember in the night? Will you ever shed your lanugo When you burrow to the surface Like any other mole? And do you see that blackbird? See him pillage the underbelly Of that fig tree you daren’t harvest? Every August I watch the spiders Come to stake their claim And every waning September When the soil is thick with jam And this forsaken blackbird Comes to get drunk in the shade I remember you could not survive here If you knew how to mind the land.’ The touch of the Gardener is everywhere: It’s in shoelaces nailed to the garden Verge guiding the jasmine’s amble In those paisley rags that stem And shackle all fledgling vegetation; And it’s in the quake of the mantle That yields to the will of this newness— He who was smothered in the airless turf He who wailed a song of labour The cats parroted back half as real. When his cry rung through the land The hemlock wore a mottled dalmatian muck— Even the sun-mouthed blackbird stirred And he soared out of the shade. Ever since the wind has quietened In the boughs of every lilac chastetree Every deciduous without leaf or shame. In the fig tree a spider has coiled its glass Around the mother of every honeybee And caught in the perlicue Of those wood-locks She, fading and febrile, divines all: ‘There’s knotweed there There on the pondside Look how it grows So strangely now! Buttercups burn soil Spots between twig thighs And your Root will know That plight in green adulthood!’ The Gardener tallies the springs it’ll take To blanch the blackberries of all his viscera How many prayers through a dandelion It’ll cost for the meadows to recover But when rumours of the honeybee Prophecy pass through the Gardener’s ear All his woe brines the rain Strips the birch of its colour. ‘You, russet of my eye Sparrow through my heart Born when the figs fell soft You were unearthed by a squirrel Who thought you a nut Buried when the conkers dropped. For you I crooned life Into a crumb of mud Stole your spirit From a waning star; Desperate, yes, like clover for dew Like the wick for the saltine match. And I remember the spring You sprouted a mind The blackbird sobbed all season long— His fate is too twined with yours now Pips puncture the chords of his song. But you, child, suckling on thyme I saw your soul come unstuck in the night; So I cut you from that cooling core Brought you here on the tooth of a knife. For this was a place untouched by chaos Where hawthorn dappled the shade Before you no stone barb in the turf No toadstool with blistering heads. Only, a thimble-casket For the honeybee mother Now rests on an obsidian plinth And when the hajjis circle They howl out a question: What is that darkness to which she went?’