Tess Taylor

We unstave the winter’s tangle. Sad tomatoes, sullen sky. We unplay the summer’s blight. Rotted on the vine, black fruit swings free of the strings that bound it. In the compost, ghost melon; in the fields(,) grotesque extruded peppers. We prod half-thawed mucky things. In the sky, starlings eddying. Tomorrow, snow again, old silence. Today, the creaking icy puller. Last night I woke to wild unfrozen prattle. Rain on the roof— a foreign liquid tongue.

In the dirt you dig fragments. Turn them and ponder. Weed chard. Forms morph like clouds. At lunch, you write down how in this jungle a gem-backed toad startled and hopped away— how June tiger lilies trumpet the sun. In the bean patch brown spiders, egg sacs on their backs. Toddling through shadows, sturdy, wobbling, fragile, pregnant as summer is—

They go, the early flags, the gory maples— so too the daffodils & Lenten roses. Other petals swirl & nights warm. Buds thicken and cast shadows: in a thunderstorm I almost forget the ice that was. Narcissi suckle watery paths; meadows heap up emerald masses. How green & I want to delight except this undertow—it pulls so fast passing before I recognize it— like souls in Dante who can’t see the present, white lilacs curdle in pre-summer heat. The parade I barely noticed was beginning is already halfway down the street.

Nimble, preserved together, milkweed-white rears upturned, female tule elk bowed into rustling foxtails. Males muscled over the slopes, jostling mantles, marking terrain. Their antlers clambered wide, steep as the gorges. As they fed, those branches twitched, sensory, delicate, yet when one buck reared squaring to look at us his antlers and his gaze held suddenly motionless. Further out, the skeleton. The tar paper it seemed to lie on was hide. Vertebrae like redwood stumps— an uneven heart-shaped cavern where a coccyx curled to its tip. Ribs fanned open hollow, emptied of organs. In the bushes its skull. Sockets and sinuses, mandible, its few small teeth. All bare now except that fur the red-brown color of a young boy’s head and also of wild iris stalks in winter still clung to the drying scalp. Below the eye’s rim sagged flat as a bicycle tire. The form was sinking away. The skin loosened, becoming other, shedding the mask that hides but must also reveal a creature. Off amid cliffs and hills some unfleshed force roamed free. In the wind, I felt the half-life I watched watch me. Elk, I said, I see you abandon this life, this earth— I stood for a time with the bones.

—for N.C. 1 Among all the harvests these are ones we make myth of— heat loosening squash spicing the dew as we rush to fill the restaurant order— haul our ripe crates. Organic cash crop: to market, to market. 2 New worlds on the sky, sungold solar systems. Gold balls on the chain. We map our hands in the scent of tomato. 3 Lost ones sag. Lost ones break. Birds peck. The ground oozes. The unpicked fruit wavers. We catch what we can. 4 Basic: between stalks for hours in binary motion—ripe/ not ripe, not mental really not boring either decisions of thumb & forefinger forging attunement between body & vine; as if picking were all we were made for— plop plop in crates in our upturned shirts. 5 I was in the field the day you called to say you’d lose the baby. How your sac was broken, and there was no saving it, just the waiting. I stood there, the whole day wrapped around me. I stood there, crying, smelling vine. 6 Another day of work. Another. 7 All month I thought of you, of us, the women, of all the trying to & breaking open. Of the rainsplit? ones, the ones that burst. And of the smells of vine & harvest. I wanted to give you tomatoes. 8 Here, a life is many ripened. Sprung, the seeded cells, a fragile mix of luck and tending. Warm furze blur of dust & buzzing. Tangle risen from the mud & marching. Here we are not self but species breaking as we bend & also fruiting pressing onward in the long bright tide: yes it breaks & yes it also swells—

1 & the radio reports how in 2050 farming Massachusetts will be like farming Georgia— all’s flux, no one can say what will grow in Georgia, where maples will grow then or whose fine taps will sap sugar from the cold in spring. Will we get syrup from the boreal forest, peaches from Massachusetts? 2 Drone strikes & opium poppies. Oil spills & poisoned wells. Drought zone. Famine. War zone. 3 Artisanal, this intervention: what gift this day. 4 My inner cynic says don’t bother this is navel gazing & my friend at Yale says my hunger to be near zucchinis will not save the planet from real hunger except I remember in the film on gleaning when the priest in his compassion says: those who glean now out of spiritual hunger also should be fed. 5 Ecosystem of yard or field or mind: these cucumbers are more art than science, more daydream than global action (if we separate the two). But digging now I feel an otherness— life, a great inhuman freedom— here I work a plot that also grounds—