for Tony and Suzanne

Digging for Jerusalem artichoke
and horseradish root in a sunlit patch
where spring snows have melted clear.
The earth soft for the taking,
I dig down here because the pain
has not stopped, has buried me
in a drifting, white uncertainty,
a swirl that rages and does not die,

until I cannot live another minute
with Millet’s “Laughing Girls”
half-veiled in the shadows of my home,
giggling into courtyards full of light
to whatever suitors wave beyond the frame;
cannot live with the wandering Jew
tangled in a brown mat of neglect,
the jade jaded with a surfeit of sun,
and the home and family I had dreamed
with her, gone.

I come to Whedons’ house
because they will not have me Easter alone.
Hours ago we soaked salt from the ham,
scalloped potatoes, baked bread
we will break together in another hour –
and then off to dig these offerings,
roots and tubers fresh from winter.

We walk their twenty acres,
rehearsing this season of plenty –
mark the hummocks and brooks rising,
the moss rising and the bog rising,
tadpoles and water beetle swelling,
the white larvae too numerous to count
swelling like stars in a dark pool.
I eat the root in my hand until the water

of my eyes is confused and pain has suddenly a taste.
I gnaw at tubers, dirt and all,
their buttery, nutty flavor that heals
the tongue of its wounds,
the flavor of having lasted
all winter beneath the earth, under the good graces
of the snows, under death’s small matter
of leaves and grasses. And still whole
at the next turning of the earth.
I cradle these roots in my hands,
note the blood from digging, blood
under my nails, in the creases
of my marrying lines, along the knuckles
scraped raw.

To the berry bushes
returning with their red scars and bulges,
we do a sun-old dance. We test
the winter-surviving timbers
that will rise in a new wood shed,
spin the water wheel that with snowmelt
will generate its one watt of light.
And we rehearse the divorce
to come – how I will swallow whatever grief
has ham as it first salt-washed course,
and bitter herbs, and bread broken
from the whole loaf with friends.

Night in their cabin, we listen
to the waters curling around the foundation,
small waterfalls stumbling among the stones,
sacring bells of sound to wash pain
smooth as silt. Evening rumbles from the west,
thunderheads worrying a path across the sloping dell
until we imagine by the fire-lit last course
of dinner how our cabin is an ark,
with its kerosene lanterns swinging port and starboard,
its pairs of dogs and cats, it couple of proprietors,
and their one guest casting for an olive branch,
as we float down the swale to Route 118,
clear to the heart of Montgomery Center.