"We must cultivate our garden..."

This poem makes a good start. At the time I wrote it, I was living in an upstairs apartment in a towering but already dilapidated Victorian house in Ithaca, NY.  I cut my very first vegetable garden into the only level tract of ground in its steep hillside yard. This is how I've gardened ever since: on a small scale with my own brand of piety and maternal affection.

The Garden

I peel back sod, like skin, from this small plot,
and turn it upside down to blanch in darkness.
Sun brittles inverted roots;
Air rings with the trauma of my hoe.

I frighten even myself, being no sure gardener,
knowing nothing of the future but a dream
festooned with vines, pendant with grapes and tomatoes.

I would become a member of the church
which lies on its side, whose hope
is Cornucopia: that nature's imprint,
joined to my desire,
will be wholesome, will take the shape
of that long, inexhaustible basket of fruit
pointing back behind itself

and tumbling out ahead.