It's garden time!

I'm not planning to plant potatoes this spring (then again I wasn't planning to plant asparagus, and guess what I bought the other day?) but all my plantlings are growing fabulously, even the indigo rose tomatoes that my evil kitten Momo the Destroyer kicked off the windowsill the other day. Two kinds of winter squash, pumpkins, zucchini, five types of tomato, bell peppers, hot peppers, garlic, onions, two types of carrots, yellow beets, three types of beans, eggplant, watermelon, cucumbers, and some flowers my little guy and I couldn't resist: Chinese Lanterns, Bells of Ireland, coleus, and the red tulips he planted last year, not to mention the asparagus crowns I picked up the other day. I suppose I could fit potatoes in there somehow.....

Digging Potatoes, Sebago, Maine

by Amy E. King

 

Summer squash and snap-beans gushed
all August, tomatoes in a steady splutter

through September. But by October’s
last straggling days, almost everything

in the garden was stripped, picked,
decayed. A few dawdlers:

some forgotten carrots, ornate
with worm-trail tracery, parsley parched

a patchy faded beige. The dead leaves
of potato plants, defeated and panting,

their shriveled dingy tongues
crumbling into the mud.

     You have to guess where.
     The leaves migrate to trick you. Pretend
     you’re sure, thrust the trowel straight in,
     hear the steel strike stone, hear the song
     of their collision—this land is littered
     with granite. Your blade emerges
     with a mob of them, tawny freckled knobs,
     an earthworm curling over one like a tentacle.
     I always want to clean them with my tongue,
     to taste in this dark mud, in its sparkled scatter
     of mica and stone chips, its soft genealogy
     of birch bark and fiddleheads, something

that means place, that says here,
with all its crags and sticky pines,

its silent stubborn brambles. This
is my wine tasting. It’s there,

in the potatoes: a sharp slice with a different blade
imparts a little milky blood, and I can almost

smell it. Ferns furling. Barns rotting.
Even after baking, I can almost taste the grit