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| Trapped and Released My father�s garden late fall, the grass grows thick and richly green on the paths in between the beds of fading tomato vines and flowers, whose July glory is gone and is shriveling back into the earth. The disarray of the garden is a concern to my father. When I arrive Saturday we move to trim back the grass with his john-Deere tractor and to fix the vegetable beds so that they do not look like dying plants but naked rows of deep brown earth lifted like a fresh burial plot. The tractor�s battery has fallen asleep from lack of use. I wonder why my father has left it uncovered in back yard exposed to the elements. I wonder why the trailer attached has a flat tire. Once started the rusting thing runs well and my father walks beside me as I drive through the garden gates and down the path, flat tire on the trailer and all. It is then something quite out of the ordinary occurs. Across the broken corn stalks in the corner of the fence a baby deer stands light as a feather, tense, trapped. I do not think how beautiful it looks, how soft it must feel; all I know is it�s eyes have locked on to mine possessing me with fear and heart break; please be calm I want to say, please be calm and it is not-- leaps in attempt to clear the fence and falls back on its fragile legs. Please be calm I want to say. My father claims to have seen this happen recently; says a fawn trapped itself in the same corner says he walked over, lifted it like a dog and placed it gently on the other side. My father at 61, I don�t know if this is what happened in his garden or his head. |
Chinese in the middle of the Country A Chinese take out in the middle of the country, near mom and dad�s house 40 miles east of the city. Saturday after I and my old man mow the grass which has over taken garden paths in the fall, as it should, mom serves us takeout moo goo gai pan, cashew chicken and 3 spring rolls and we watch TV as we eat. I would like to say they are behind the times, my parents. I would like to say I could never live this way, Chinese take out in the country. And it is quiet. I hear my heart beat. |
| Peppers By noon the mud�s caked, a thin epidermis like ice over snow and my feet sink as I walk through the pepper bed, slouching, lifting bent vines in search of the last harvest before winter. I find small ones, disfigured; some no bigger than golf balls and enveloped in red. I cannot hold them all, out of my hand one falls as I reach for another; my father untucks his shirt and we fill the make shift pouch with the last picking of the season. My father says he didn�t know there were so many, says he spotted a few yesterday morning tilling tomato beds before the tiller gave out. He is happy I discovered them; he is happy I am excited and surprised to be collecting peppers this late in the season, I being from the city. |
| three poems composed after a visit to my parents |
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