A perfect day for making hay. Or pickles. Or for meeting a baby. A perfect summer’s day.
“Ode to the First Peach” (poem) (Ellen Bass).
A San Diego friend emailed me this poem this week. How did she know this was the week I was missing peaches so badly? Also missing Annie of Sweet Tree Farms, the best & coolest fruit farmer in the Whole World. We do have a couple of peach trees on the property, but no fruits yet. Although there are huge, bodacious raspberries blooming. Also blueberries. And plums! So there is really nothing for me to complain about. But ooh. The joy of eating a peach. While standing over the sink. The juice dripping down my chin. And looking out the window as I bite. And taking the pit in my fingers. And throwing it outside. Just in case. It wants to grow. Into a peach tree of its own.
**
Ode to the First Peach
Only one insect has feasted here,
a clear stub of resin
plugs the scar. And the hollow
where the steam was severed
shines with juice.
The fur still silvered
like a caul. Even
in the next minute
the hairs will darken,
turn more golden in my palm.
Heavier, this flesh,
than you would imagine
like the sudden
weight of a newborn.
Oh what a marriage
of citron and blush!
It could be a planet
reflected through a hall
of mirrors. Or
what a swan becomes
when a fairy shoots it
from the sky at dawn.
At the beginning of the world,
when the first dense pith
was ravished and the stars
were not yet lustrous
coins fallen from the
pockets of night,
who could have dreamed
this would be curried
from the chaos.
Scent of morning and sugar,
bruise and hunger.
Silent, swollen, clefted life,
remnant always remaking itself
out of that first flaming ripeness.
“The Robin World Series” (poem) (mine).
The Robin World Series
What if this evening on the porch
I witnessed the Robin World Series
in which all Robins in the world
surrounding my home split into two teams
with mascots named after berries and seeds
and played each other in order to win
not only the bushiest and best-hidden nest
but also a cup crafted from the cap
of an acorn brimming with nectar
collected by hummingbirds?
And what if in the ninth inning
the Robins boycotted the whole event
because it had gotten too long and too late
and their children were starving at home?
The past month or so in photographs.
This is one of the farms that will not be our home.
This was at the farmers’ market in Montpelier, when Ellie was visiting, and we met up with Kenzie, who is also a Suzie’s Farm Person, and she had those long fabulous dreadlocks.
This was when Ellie and Scott and Josh were staying over. I made Misha wear my happy wreath because he was happy, too. And we drank that whole bottle of bourbon. And life was sweet and Scott jumped in the pond and Josh ended up getting a free Suzie’s Farm hat.
This is my favorite photo of my friend Andrew, because the sun is all up in his face.
Those ladies? Oh those are my ladies.
These are some bodacious poppies and some pretty Unidentified Other Flowers that grow beneath the grapes in front of our house.
This is another farm which we won’t live on. But boy, was it pretty.
This is my pen pal, Shannon. She’s even better in person than written. Plus, she’s married! Also, a poet!
This was the fourth of July. Misha didn’t even mean to wear red white and blue and we had sausages for dinner.
This is Misha with flowering mullein on Cape Cod. He really loves that plant. And in this photograph, he even matches it!
This is my family in the early 90s. I don’t think I’ll ever be as baller as I was that day on Cape Cod, with that stance and that minnow net and that belly-bearing bathing suit. Also: how cute is my sister. Also also: notice how all our bathing suits match!
This was leaving the Cape just today, admiring the font of the Sagamore Bridge, admiring structure.
Landscapes (little farmy poem) (mine).
Landscapes
Last year I met garlic scapes
and I loved them on impact
and incorrectly called them snapes
for almost a year. Then I learned
their name and learned their twisting
goose-necked beauty and cut them
thinly into dishes. Now they grow
in rows outside our kitchen
and they grow in rows at the farm
where I work in the kitchen
and they’re filling the crisper drawer
and they’re all over our salads
and they’re harvested in baskets
and they’re not a food to sustain a nation
or even a main meal ingredient
but they’re one of our first little harvests
and for that I am grateful.
(Photo by my partner & co-farmer & longtime love Misha, whose blog is titled Microcosmic DreamSCAPES. Coincidence? I think yes.)
(For more of Misha’s farm photos, click here.)
(We are Free Verse Farm!)
Love & friends & verklempt (something in prose).
I don’t think I’m a poet of the atrocities, or even of the victories. I think I’m a poet of the people I love. I’m trying to make sense of how much there is to love in the world. I’m trying to put into words the moment when someone reaches out to touch someone else’s face, but then doesn’t, and then that person never knows that that other person wanted to touch them. And so that touch will never be in the history books. But I might just get it into a poem.
Do you have any famous friends? Friends who people know because of something they did or wrote? I have a couple of great friends in a band and it makes me insanely proud and insanely baffled to know them and to see them progressing in the music world and to know that they are an entity outside of the dudes that I got to know in college. And to think that I knew them in a dorm hallway, with their morning hair and their late night gaits. How I’d leave the coed bathroom when I’d see one of them with their sneakers facing outward in a stall (pooping!).
I have a lot of friends who really impress me. Not just because of their jobs, but sometimes because of their jobs. I have some friends who were born knowing how to be great friends. A lot of my friends aren’t the same as each other. A couple of my friends are attempting similar back-to-the-land plans as I am, but most of them aren’t. I’m here as a human and as a girl and as a poet and as a farmer-in-training to say: my friends, I love the shit out of you. I know you know it already, maybe because I told you recently in an email or textual exclamation or maybe I sent you something recently or maybe you read a poem here that reminded you of it. Either way, I might as well say it often, because life is short and fast (especially in summer).
So here’s a music video that really impresses me featuring some dudes I know. For some reason this video is making me want to hug people (BAD), probably because I’ve been drinking wine and I live with a man I adore and because it’s summer and there’s quite nearly enough sunlight to provide for all the words I want to write and say each day. Amen.
Poem of today (poem with friends in it) (mine).
Double Double
Today a couple of honeymooners came over
to sit on the porch for hours and eat
lunch and coffee cake. The clouds cleared
for them and the frogs burped their hellos
and later poems will be written
with scythes in them and we will all approve
or not. After they left I stirred honey
into my tea (like always) and hoped
the clouds would clear again for them later
so that the moon could shine on their sweet
little cabin as they read their magazines
and sipped their tea. My honey and I
sat on the porch after they drove away,
in different chairs, reading our books
as storms rolled over, the scythed-down
grass flattening against the rest, birds flitting
back to nests. To be honest I can’t tell
a bird’s nest from a bat box but I am
gosh-darned over-the-moon about
homes in general, about porches and the moon
and frogs that celebrate a thunderstorm.
Love & violence & beauty in The New Yorker (poem) (Jericho Brown).
How many amazing poets have you met? How many people have you met that have hypnotized you–literally hypnotized, the world swimming away–by reading one of their poems? Jericho Brown is an amazing poet and a skilled teacher and also an elegant creature. I took some workshops with him, and he came to a birthday party of mine once, and I wrote him a poem about his favorite color, orange, after he came to speak in one of my classes. I hope he liked it. He was in the New Yorker recently, and that, my friends, is a victory. For The New Yorker. And for all of us who know him. And for all of us who get to read The New Yorker because our mothers-in-laws give us their finished issues. The end.
Bacon Poem #1 (mine).
Bacon Poem #1
Bacon
is the reward we get
for cooking
ourselves bacon.
Flowers & friends (poemthing).
The flowers have arrived.
One of the friends has arrived.
When she arrived, we picked flowers.
Violets. Dandelions.
Soon two more friends will arrive.
And the flowers will just keep on coming.
panache, perhaps 