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
squat, hunkered like a wounded stag—vestige
— Odocoileus virginianus
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—
thistles in the window box, paint flaking
— Cirsium canescens
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.
[1] The industrial manufacture of beet sugar, an innovation of German chemists in the late 18th century, was first established in France at the behest of Napoleon following the English continental blockade of the Napoleonic wars, which precluded importation of cane sugar from the tropics to his nascent empire. Alongside four imperial beet sugar factories, Napoleon also chartered a number of technical schools for the training of cultivators and producers. On the heels of the first profitable beet-sugar operation in North America, established in Alvarado, California toward the close of the 19th century, the sugar-beet industry gained a foothold in the American West. By the middle of the 20th century, beet cultivation occupied even the meager resources of our family farm in Weld County, Colorado, where beets are still grown, season to season.
