The carrots are freezing.
Tops—flags flying stiffly above,
the remnant earth cracking
and dried from the season.
Rabbits make good stewmates
in the winter, and I swear
a little rosemary, a little thyme,
then some roadside weeds that
thicken like okra, los taganines
Tita Maruchi used, I say
damn. Damn. The smells
before her cancer came.
The indefinable smell
of a hospital, only she
died at home, feathers flapping
and angels were singing,
Where did Monday go?
I came here for peace’s sake.
Sold—my fields, the last
of the cotton to weave dresses,
and the indigo to dye them—
and now I stand atop a mountain.
Mountains for coffee
and tropical limes,
I picked a weatherhead,
frozen blue like a north sea
masthead— never. lucky.
at. harvest. Where did Monday go?
So I sit and dig,
and so maybe N.A.S.A.
—the space program—maybe
a super futuristic Mars mission
will have uses
for a still, silent carrot
that flies thousands of miles
an hour, crash landing into tenderness
in a bath of pressurized steam,
for the astronauts of the Red Planet.
The ROVER will go places
that will never laugh with me,
will never cook rabbit for me,
and I’ll not look at Mars the same.
x
Maruchi’s gums would show when
she smiled, the tiniest baby teeth,
and the warmest nods when
my uncle would wag his fingers.
They kept canaries, yellow and white,
in an adjoining room,
a symphony of greeting.
I wasn’t there the night she passed,
but they were singing. My uncle,
devastated, came twenty years later slight
and balding. He showed me how
to trim a hedge. He built a base
for our family’s Virgin Mary,
for the wisteria grotto in the back.
I haven’t heard from him since.
I haven’t eaten rabbit since.
