​Tilling
I like a plantation in a pure soil, that is, where people are not displanted to plant others in.
                                                                                                    -Sir Francis Bacon, “Of Plantations”
Sunday we attacked 
our savage square
of suburban backyard, 
tilling the periphery to sow in
herbs & flowers whose bright
faces & fragrances we know
as well as their names.

It was hard work, not at all
what I expected, not at all
bucolic, not like 
combing sand in some 
shrink’s mini zen garden. 
This was war

and our opponents were the things
that had been growing there
all this time, green, gangly things 
with roots as long as my arm, I noticed, 
when I squatted down to rip them out. 
No name for them, why not call them 
weeds (though they were not all 
the same color or shape, certainly not all 
from the same seed). They were 
everywhere, growing without our noticing 
or our permission & hearty & hale, 
they didn’t want to leave.
We might have gone on like this
forever, our hands, each only two, pitted 
against their spindly knots of roots, 
fists not so much fighting as clenching,
bunkering down in the dirt 
they’d always thought of 
as theirs (didn’t they know 
we held the title?). Thankfully, 
in the end, there was a mini-tiller for rent 
at the big box store so it only took 
a minute. We didn’t have to get
that close.

Later, after we cleaned up 
the carcasses we’d strewn 
everywhere, we were already laughing
about how these things we tilled out 
to sow our garden in put up a good fight, 
how they made our bodies hurt, how 
positively, sincerely thankful we were 
for how well they kept the dirt— 
so worm-rich, so fertile till we got there 
to take it as our own.