RK As a Young Gardener
where is the grass in your garden, bob, that thrives in drought at 40
below, and drives spikes into the heart of the garden you are
hoping to turn into a hot bed of noxious poetry and how beset by
mildew and beetles does your cabbage grow
i sing of pig weed dock and lamb’s quarter sing the cows who
amble stoically through the ragweed taller than rain forests you
felled and ploughed by dandelions that shone like wet suns witness
to your faith in cauliflower until you pulled one just for a fistful of
yellow a clump of dirt you raked spring looking for snakes and
crickets and what we called portulaca that clung to clay roads and
gravel lanes and your front yard except it was camomile where
they propped cars and thistles popped like revolutionaries from
shadow and from the shallow dirt into proper muffs that
turn purple and bristle under a sun that shriveled your mother’s
petunias the cows knowing there was stinkweed first thing in
spring, shockingly lush, which they leaped moons and fences to
eat, trampled wire and post, spoiled the milk with their slobbery
green breath moseyed near the leggy brown-eyed susans alongside
the ditches that rolled in clover a hard row to hoe where the
potatoes dug in like sappers and someone plucked the lady bugs
doused them in kerosene
by Robert Kroetsch
from The Typescript