Cover Photo:  Kathryn Olmstead Cover Design:  William J. Kelle

Up from the Root Cellar “If the root cellar connotes dark and damp, it also promises nourishment . . .” – Ellen Doré Watson “. . . a quick and unblinking look to the cold soupy, death-in-life world that roots our body’s generation . . .” – David Gewanter “. . . tender, gently subversive poems, with their rich wordplay and mischievous imagery . . .”– Jean Nordhaus Available now!

Up From the Root Cellar

The doors slant out of the ground.
They open and close like an Orthodox triptych.
I pull up on the right,
gray without a trace of iconic gold,
pull up on the left, and I walk down
through what might be the center panel,
the Panaghia, say, or St. Demetrios on a red horse,
maybe George, patron of agriculture,
down into a dimension
where life’s cells preserve
long after the season.
I feel tired and sit down next to the cellar wall,
and I refrigerate myself there,
put the breaking-down
of my own cells in abeyance
and try to figure out in the dark of winter
just what it is I do
on the other side of the slanted doors.
When spring comes and no mouse
has nibbled at my knuckles,
I emerge, still young, still plump and tasty,
feeling slightly saintly,
but squinting in what has once been familiar sunlight.

Famine

   . . . the body is dyed

   by illness like a piece of cloth

   by an extraneous color.

        —W.G. Sebald

The dyer makes the linen
a deeper color of dug earth,
boils it in water with acacia
until the natural mole’s-back gray-tan
becomes peat-bog purple.

The well-fed lord is not pleased
with the linen’s new color
and wants it changed back.
The dyer replies that once a beginning unfolds,
recovery of what was is not possible.

And he feels helpless walking home that night
to his beyond-hungry child.
On a cot she lies fevered,
her hair fallen out, her mouth without saliva.

Transports come by every evening
to gather the dead, and they jostle
over the river to a far-from-town field,
where blackened by illness tubers also rest.

The dyer lies down next to his daughter,
and while she sleeps,
he tries to solve the undyeing of a piece of cloth.             

Dendrochronology

The rings of a tree show wide
from a wet season, narrow from a dry,
             which is difference and balance.              

Like attracts like in the way a water drop
             beckons another water drop on a blade of grass
and they slide into each other for comfort-

like the comfort in balance that Earth on a diagonal axis
searches for, the slant slit between moist/arid.
             How simple opposites, how ingrained              

into equilibrium. Nourish and starve:
             the greens of leaves equalize
the tawny brittle easing up in autumn.

Like repels like, too, in a world where no one-
not even the carrier-knows who carries
             the evil eye, and so the turquoise-and-black eye itself              

pins to the baby's sleeve, balancing evil
             and protection from evil. And in case I am a carrier,
I spit three times into the earth to neutralize the possibility.

Out of the earth, secrets eventually rise to the surface.
Graves beneath tree roots and granite cave in
             begging for rock, sand, and soil to fill in what is gone

             for good, until there's nothing else to disintegrate
             and balance has reached its own fulfillment.
The difference by then is a forgetting,

which craves knowledge to take its place
unless it neglects to crave or has forgotten how.
             The empty goblet is not always filled again.

             And to swallow is to feel the roughness of the dry tongue,
             thirst then increasing out of proportion
to what is bearable in the human body

like some of the circles in the cross-section of a tree trunk
the narrowest among them, defining the agony of drought
             through a doomed growing season.

Coming from Turning Point in October 2008!

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