Mud Season
We unstave the winter’s tangle.
Sad tomatoes, sullen sky.
We unplay the summer’s blight.
Rotted on the vine, black fruit
swings free of strings that bound it.
In the compost, ghost melon; in the fields
grotesque extruded peppers.
We prod half-thawed mucky things.
In the sky, starlings eddying.
Tomorrow, snow again, old silence.
Today, the creaking icy puller.
Last night I woke
to wild unfrozen prattle.
Rain on the roof—a foreign liquid tongue.
(2016)
The poet says: “A few years back I had the chance to move out of Brooklyn and live in Amy Clampitt’s former home in the Berkshires for a full year. We moved in January, and the snow and the freeze were thick. One of the great surprises of getting to live in a rural area and watch its minute changes was the sheer noisy force of spring. The intense cracking and water noises during the first thaws, and the actually unsettlingly loud clatter of the first rain—all of this reminded me that spring has another deep meaning of ‘gush’ or ‘flow.’ By the time this poem was written, I was also working on a nearby farm a few days a week. I hope that the poem, and the book, actually, get at the bodily pleasure, but also the strangeness, of being so close to both the season and the work.”
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