Beta vulgaris vulgaris ^[1]

Planetscape blanched to a chemical peel.

Furrow on furrow, tractor tread cracking

the flatland through to the weed-lipped progress

of Box Elder Creek, dribbling distantly:

a sound of human speech alive in it.

May, and the green of my grandmother’s grass,

a relief on the landscape. Her farmhouse

of the Age of Asbestos, of turquoise

and television; an old radial

pitched on the garret, spoke-sharp and rusting

there, hung like a weird horn from the forehead

of the twentieth century, a fool.

The house, the stable in its ricket lean,

stands empty. Someone’s curtained up the glass—

down her door. Grandmother’s gone to her bliss:

how far, I wonder, from these people, hers,

whom she could not bear to love?

It’s years since

we pilgrimed a box of my mother’s ash

and chalked the rotten earth with turning it

here. I’d occasion then, asked: what should rise

at judgment, steeped in so much bitterness?

What should rise from the moon-fine dust, torn up

through some hole in the world, wry and blinking

to brush glyphosate crystal like dried salt

from the corners of its eyes?

What must rise?

By June, wrinkled leaves like so many hands

of beets will spring, gracious and fluttering

with inscrutable gesture, bulbs plumping

to bob, come harvest, in a sea of sweet:

this thing, this troubled marvel of our time

will rise a marvel, and sweetly anyhow.