This is a poem I did not write for you,
Although you still were in it: every line
Bent
Around your absence, like the light through water.
This is a verse I wrote without you there.

This is me feeling out the space with language
and stretching my words into the place you left.
This is my fingers taking up the slack
and drawing tight the thread you helped me spin.

This is a mending, maybe, or a beginning.
This is a poem I did not write for you.

There is an art to harvest.
Loop the bucket over one wrist and with that hand
reach to grasp the branch and draw it down.
Make a rake of your fingers, pass them quickly through the stems.
Repeat. Repeat again.
Don’t squeeze, or you will crush the fruit. Avoid the leaves and twigs;
like the cherry stones they are heavy with poison. Leave
every third branch you come to without picking.
This fruit feeds the bears and winter birds.

Wipe the sweat of August from your brow and drink deep before
proceeding. Resist the urge
to lick your fingers clean. There is no sweetness there.
First you must sweat your way along the bank,
wild onions sharp-crushed beneath your heel, mosquitoes
pricking at your blood.
Repeat until the bucket brims.

Go home. Wash, sort, boil. Wipe
the kitchen sweat away from your sunburned neck.
Boil. Stir. Boil. Can. Boil. In the end
you’ll catch the ruby summer fast in jars, but first
you will learn what all your mothers learned by doing:

There is an art to harvest, and
Some sweetness must be earned.

It’s the kind of fun you can’t have as an adult:
The concrete garage floor made slick with blood,
The air thick with sharp, metallic, dead-thing smells,
And my uncles – the goodhearted dope, the stoner,
The braggart, the lumberjack – hard at work with cleaver,
Bone saw, and bucket. 

In fifteen minutes, they boasted, they could gut, skin, quarter out and portion 
A whole antelope or a smallish deer (elk took longer, being enormous; 
And really, they all took longer, the butchering interrupted
By sharpening knives, opening bottles of beer,
Bellowing along to Springsteen on the radio).

My brother and I would dart between their legs
Changing radio stations and fetching new bottles of Rainier, 
Since blood-slicked, beer-numbed fingers couldn’t handle dials
And the threat of bootprints barred them from the house.

Indoors was order; the kitchen table wrapped in plastic,
My calm aunts and placid mother making short work
Of skirt steak, rump roast, brisket, flank and loin.
Those packets – neat, efficient, tightly bound
In crisp white paper, labeled with name and date –
Were nothing like what came from that garage.

Those few steps were a thousand-mile gap
And nothing but meat crossed it;
Except me and my brother, carrying bottles of beer,
Except the laughter born of butchery.

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.