Maxine Kumin
In the Root Cellar
The parsnips those rabbis
have braided their beards together
to examine the text. The word
that engrosses them is: February.
To be a green tomato
wrapped in the Sunday book section
is to know nothing. Meanwhile
the wet worm eats his way outward.
These cabbages, these clean keepers
in truth are
a row of impacted stillbirths.
One by one we deliver them.
The apples are easy abutters
a basket of pulltoys and smiles.
Still, they infect one another
like children exchanging the measles.
O potato, a wink of
daylight and you're up with
ten tentative erections.
How they deplete you!
Dusty blue wart hogs, the squash
squat for a thump and a tuning.
If we could iron them out
they'd be patient blue mandolins.
The beets wait wearing their birthmarks.
They will be wheeled into the amphitheater.
Even before the scrub-up, the scalpel,
they bleed a little.
I am perfect, breathes the onion.
I am God's first circle
the tulip that slept in His navel.
Bite me and be born.
Maxine Kumin, Selected Poems 1960-1990, W.W. Norton, 1998.