Poetry by Connie Jordan Green from Household inventory
Ten Ways of Looking at an Appalachian Woman
i.
Among ten tall mountains
the most enduring being is a woman.
ii.
When the stars were flung across the galaxy
the first cells foretold her appearance.
iii.
She is known for her ability to create supper
from a handful of meal and a piece of fatback.
iv.
Veins of coal are nothing
compared to iron in her arteries.
v.
Words are pebbles in her mouth.
She spits them into stone walls.
vi.
Her silence is like a scolding.
vii.
Before dark she does
the work of many men.
viii.
I know not which is most beautiful—
the grace of her body when she is young
or her will when she matures.
ix.
A man and a woman are one,
but a man and a mountain woman
are like the girding of a steel structure.
x.
When she comes at last to rest,
even the ravens fold up their glossy wings.
Persephone Addresses the Herbs
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ... the harvesting of herbs and vegetables was often accompanied by the chanting of verses or the muttering of spells.
—from Betty Crocker's Kitchen Gardens
Lovage, chervil, sweet marjoram,
what has it cost you to remain
safe from winter's wrath
in your airtight jars?
Colors faded, leaves dry as old skin,
still you punctuate our dinner,
give back summer's flavor,
essence of meals almost forgotten.
You awaken memory of sun's long journey.
Here in underground's Stygian gloom
let us praise perennials—mint, sage,
rosemary, tarragon, thyme—hearty
souls who outlast snow, ice,
who endure while our eyes close
on dreams of pale lavender blooms,
gaiety of chamomile flowers.
Blessings upon generous biennials—
angelica, frilly parsley—who hallow
our planting with a second year of growth.
Soon spring and tender basil, sweet
bay, garden cress. May our spirits
rise like green tips of chives
long held prisoner in eternal night.
Tending the Garden
You don’t have to know what feeds the seed,
urges its metamorphosis into tendril and stem,
into leaf, flower, fruit, and then seed once more.
You don’t have to understand soil, mix of loam
and sand, peat and manure, acidity, alkalinity,
how clay can harden or sponge up moisture,
the role of earthworms tunneling
their evolutionary trails, eating the earth,
casting their wealth. You don’t have to measure
rainfall, track sun’s northward journey,
its turning at last back toward equinox.
You don’t have to learn Latinate nomenclature,
study genetics, Mendel’s years of pea vines.
You need only tie on a hat, slip your feet
into last year’s sneakers, kneel where sun
and rain, where seasons and weather bless
your bent back, pronounce a beneficence
on your garden-loving soul.
Ode to an Onion
These tears fall for you
renegade of earth
pungent parcel
flavor for soup, meat, and sauce.
Beneath the knife's blade
your layers part—
translucent slivers
crescent moons.
Only the tomato
rosy in her skin
juiced without remorse
rivals your versatility—
in a melodrama, you win
your soul too sweet for tragedy.
Pale Shadow
I pull weeds from bean rows while seeds
that spawned these stalks slumber
among a thousand kin. They will sprout,
the professor of agriculture told me,
for eighty or ninety years yet, their lives
a Methuselah legend my back
will never conquer, like starlight long
dead still traveling its eleven-million miles
per minute, messages our minds will puzzle over
until our own cells and senses blur and dim.
Knees in the dirt, hands searching and tugging,
I bring a temporary order—the same blow
for orderliness I’ve struck these seventy
years—dishes washed and stacked on shelves,
dirt swept beyond the doorway, sheets
washed, sun-dried, tucked over mattresses—
as if the world wants to be made
perfect, as if the living must print
their pattern, cast a lengthening
shadow before the face of chaos.
To Robert Frost
Often in the spring
I walk my own
steep-pitched pastures
far from Vermont hills.
Old poet, I want to say,
did you, too, love the land
more than words
so that all those lines—
those metered rhymed cadences
that seemed to pour forth
spontaneous as buds
on your beloved birches—
were of less use to you
than plows turning
the good black earth?
No Country for Old Women
This is no country for old women—
cedar waxwings line up
on apple tree limb, pass
petals from beak to beak,
the last fed first, wrens
fledge from their garden shoe
nest near the back door,
cling to porch screen
while mature birds scold
from maple bough.
This is no country for old women—
bucks roam the field,
antlers of velvet polished
against oak and hickory,
does hide spotted fawns
in last fall’s leaves, young
deer chase each other
near our garden, surprised
to see our gray heads close
together, bent over the first
mum flowering in late August.
This is no country for old women—
ghosts of children flit
through the house, hide
beneath stairs, in attic rooms,
refuse their vegetables, advice
about their hair, their clothes,
choice of friends. I find their crumbs,
trails they’ve left, daring me to follow
into a country where old and young
rise together, hands linked
in a chain hauling up memory
like water from a deep well.
At the Feed Store
Bins brim with onion bulbs—
small, covered in crinkly paper
like pages of a family Bible.
Outside, April sky spreads
her blue coverlet over a landscape
of yellow jonquils, tulips, red and pink.
In the shop we are concerned
with the dormant—bags of shriveled
peas, boxes of potatoes smelling
of earth—only pictures to promise
the green, the luxuriant.
I rummage
among the onions, scoop out
a handful, weigh them on a scale
old as the store’s oiled floor boards,
dump them into a brown paper bag
I’ll carry home, set beside me
while I kneel on the warm black
soil, trowel a hole, bury the bulb,
tip pointing up for growth
straight toward the sun—
like my father before me, tending
the useless that it may
grow into its abundance.