After the Ice Retreated


When they had slashed and burned a linden stand
to make a field, they waited for the rain
to put the fires out and drive the ash
into the soil. They waited for the grass
their sheep might crop (or whatever it was they kept)
while the blackened stumps of trees grew less erect
and browner each season that elapsed, until
the earth they had proposed was framed and fit to toil.

Where they hacked down a forest and laid waste
the boreal shade, they summoned to the place
a world tree whose iron roots drove down
deep into that earth, whose branches touched the sun.
A linden, like every other tree around,
but one that neither fire nor patience would bring down.




Asparagus


Sparrow grass, the English called it once, tripping
over the Latin the Roman troops brought in.
But they must have had their own word for it, something
that meant first green shoot or lance of spring,
a word now lost, along with whatever the older
tribes driven west by the English might have called it
(Fairy’s spear? Big Will? Green baby’s bonnet?)
old names, setting like suns, one after another.

And sparrow grass itself is moving west.
Say it—sparrow grass—and we will speak
of birds, the small birds down among the stalks
and chaff, in their cities of straw, building the nests
the mowers will pass over while it is yet spring
and sparrows raise their young and teach them to sing.