The Artichoke
She bore only the
heart,
Worked at the stem with
her
Fingers, pulling it to
her,
And into her, like a cord.
She would sustain
him,
Would cover his
heart.
The hairy needles
And the bigger leaves,
These she licked into
shape,
Tipping each with its
point.
He is the mud-flower,
The thorny hugger.
The Asparagus
She sent packs of great
beasts to pass
Over him, trailing belly-fur
and dust,
Bending their nostrils to his
frail spear.
This was to toughen him. For
what?
Stupidly, like a squirrel,
standing up,
Looking here and there,
looking to all sides,
He is cut down and taken
away.
She can smell him steaming,
his crowns
Already tender, his spine
giving in.
Now he is threatening to
wither terribly,
And slip from the water
altogether,
And billow through the
kitchen like prayer.
The Cauliflower
Her words clot in his head.
He presses himself to
remember
And feels the skin peel back,
The skull bleach, crack, fall
away.
All that's left of him is the
brain,
Its tissue knotting up to
shade him,
The pain of its light pulsing
How to move, how to move.
Herbs
Before fog leaves the
scrub-oak
Or the grasses of the
downland,
Take dragonwort under the
black alder,
Take cockspur grass and
henbane,
The belladonna, the deadly
nightshade.
Free them as you would a
spider's web,
Singing over them: Out,
little wen,
Out, little wen.
Sing this into the mouth of
the woman.
Corn
I am the corn
quail.
What I do is quick.
You will know
only
The muffled
clucking,
The scurry, the
first
Shiver of
feathers
And I will be
up,
I will be in your
Head with no way
out,
Wings beating at
the
Air behind your eyes.
Celery
The hope
with
water is that it
will conceal nothing,
that a clearness
will follow upon
it
like the
clearness
after much rain,
or the
clearness
where the
air
reaches to the river
and touches it,
where the
rain
falls from the
trees
into the river.
Bell Pepper
To find enough rooms for the
gathering
The walls go on alone not
waiting
For corners but thinking of
sleeves
And how the wind fills them
and the snow
Fills them and how cold it is
without
Fires when there are not
enough rooms.
Potatoes
It had been growing in her
like vegetables.
She was going into the ground
where it could
Do better, where she could
have potatoes.
They would be small and
easily mistaken
For stones. It would fall to
her to
Sort them out, persuade them
to stay
Close to her, comforting her,
letting her
Wear them on her body, in her
hair,
Helping her hold always very
still.
* * * * *
James McMichael is emeritus professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Capacity (2006), a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry; Each in a Place Apart (1994); The Lover's Familiar (1978); Four Good Things (1980); and The World at Large: New and Selected Poems (1996), in which the above poem appears. He has received multiple awards, including the 2007 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award, the Arthur O. Rense Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America.
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