Mid-Season in Zone Six

There’s simply no use trying

to grow a garden here.  Not the way tomato

vines relax in the summer heat

and rot with each heavy rain.

Not the way corn stalks

lay flat with another hard wind,

or the way cucumber vines wilt in this

humidity.  Down in the soil

the carrots grow fat and pithy,

come up with a rotten taste.  And radishes

gone to seed split their sides

as though the bright skins

cannot hold all that blistering, white flesh.

All the while the half-turned

pumpkins twist off their stems

and go pale and flat against the earth.

I have never seen a picture

of the school, surely wood and rotting

even when my grandfather gazed

at the oil-slicked paper panes

that must have one night

caught fire and glowed in this valley,

hot and bright as the balled fist

of the sun punching its way up

from the ridge. And so

the abandonment, these toys

that will only allow themselves

to resurface a few every year.

They are the tiny, whispered

secrets of children, the only things

that persist, like multi-floral rose

brambling through the horse pasture,

choking off the chance

for anything else to grow.

And yet here is the cauliflower,

a huge white brain

continuing its dreams. Here

is the holy cabbage, folding hand

over hand in prayer that this year

there will be enough to feed us all.

-David B. Prather