There are always dead things waiting in the earth;

That’s what I learned breaking ground with my father

To expand our garden. “Everywhere you step

There’s something dead underfoot, the buried skeleton

Of buffalo or cave bear or sauropod –

Or, closer, the corpse of field mouse, snail,

Ant, aphid, sweetgrass, sage.

We walk on the dead, and among the dead,

We eat them and in time we go back to them,

And no thing lives that does not live on death.”

This is what my father said, while I,

Scrawny, at ten, and outsized by my spade,

Tried to break ground as gently as I could.