In their garden, I learned

Poems by Lee Stark

01

In their garden, I learned 

to splay the roots against their will,

ideally with wet fingers but with a knife if 

they did not want to leave. 

This would stop the entire plant from

bursting forth like a champagne cork, they said,

when the ground freezes over

and only these roots could tether her.

Ring the nursery soil to force her into the dry earth.

I looked again into my hands holding

a knife, half of her, and half a handful 

of glassy hairs held tightly within themselves, 

having looked too deeply for home.

02

I watched the men

at my window,

the driving and flattening and whirling.

I sat with the ones with roots there yesterday.

The tree of heaven and the mulberry

that took that wide block of dirt

and did what they know how to do.

It all happens to empty ground.

The men mow seed heads

with the zeal of switching tall grass.

That untamed ness

that all expands with the wind.

Feline, they feign docile

for another stroke.

In springtime I saw 

their small heads sprout anew

and how the mens’ saplings, 

gripped in concrete,

will always need human hands.