Now, this is a later and very different poem,
more in the way I'm writing now, although it's maybe
10 years old.
It's a poem called "Digging."
And it's a poem that's addressed,
in theory, to a gardener--
I mean, to a woman who likes to garden, not a professional.
I say that it's addressed to such a woman.
I said ostensibly because, like all of the things
I come to eventually realize it's really addressed to me.
One midnight, after a day when lilies lift themselves out
of the ground while you watch them,
and you come into the house at dark your fingers grubby
with digging, your eyes vague with the pleasures of digging,
let a wind raised from the south climb
through your bedroom window, lift you in its arms--
you have become as small as a seed--
and carry you out of the house, over the black garden, spinning
and fluttering, and drop you in cracked ground.
The dirt will be cool, rough to your clasped skin
like a man you have never known.
You will die into the ground in a dead sleep, surrendered
to water.
You will wake suffering, a widening pain in your side,
a breach gapped in your tight ribs
where a green shoot struggles to lift itself
upwards through the tomb of your dead flesh to the sun,
to the air of your garden where you will blossom
in the shape of your own self, thoughtless with flowers,
speaking to bees, in the language of green and yellow,
white and red.