A Green Gardener’s Nightmare

My wife wanted to plant a salad garden
on the slope behind the house,
a gap within the edge of the woods
overgrown with dock and orchard grass.
All one beaming May afternoon
I reared my uncle’s pick ax wobblingly overhead,
heaved and hung on till its evil spike thudded.
Every few strokes I’d change tools,
shove the spading fork into the crevices,
stomp down, and lever up clumps of sod.

Sitting like a child in a sandbox,
my wife shook, slapped, and plied soil from the roots
while I crouched and tossed aside shale,
bedrock shards a glacier dumped here.
I poked with a trowel for root-blocking slabs
and pried them out.
The moist, clayey dirt had a dead man’s grip.

When I stood to get my wind,
my back stayed slightly hunched.
My blurry eyes throbbed.
I stared at veins bulged like mole tunnels
on my arms, the fine hair flecked with grit.
Damn lucky I’m not condemned to do this
for my daily bread, I thought.
Wiping my brow backhanded,
I hissed a rough equivalent of the oath
Adam blurted, eyes stung shut by sweat.

After a meal and steaming bath: sublime indolence.
In bed we massaged each other’s back,
spreading almond oil, kneading the muscles
upward along the spine, at the neck
squeezing out exquisite synaptic fireworks.

When she turned over, I stayed straddling her thighs,
spellbound by her glow in the candle’s aureole.
I ate her mouth like a plum,
teased her nipples taut.
Clergy of an erotic cult,
we cast out the demon Work.

Mired in half-sleep, I came to, focused close-up on a plot
of freshly dug ground, saw the grains of soil stirring.
Instinctively, I backed away. Then, understood:
something buried was struggling to rise.

I watched a soil-crusted human form
lift head, shoulders, torso and
collapse, eaten by the earth.
Startled, I lifted myself
and felt
myself
slip
out.