OF MY GRANDMOTHER’S SHIRT

I still want to know how it felt to be
her inside it, this deep blue flannel
smelling like yellow jasmine,
& also like mothball & attic,
like hot brick-dust & the small-town Episcopal church
where for decades
she polished the chalice.
Like the afternoon decades ago
when over lunch, after that precise labor,
she told me my eyebrows
were a starlet’s,
how not to eat too much,
how to save my
carbohydrates for alcohol.
Then for dessert, in cocktail glasses,
she served us up cubed ice cream sandwiches
covered with crème de menthe.
Her last words to me were
Oh, it’s you, the collector.
She said it so tenderly:
She’d forgotten most of her world.
the questions she left hanging
unanswered. Our shirt on, I go snap
deadheads in the front garden.
I ask her: Now can we talk?
I push next year’s daffodils deeper.
I smooth out the ache in our back.
In cold soil, I pile up our stones. 

 

BRASSICA OLERACEA
                                     (Tree collard)

Leathery,
bitter to taste,    in my front garden the tree collard, 

half-wilds to vine.
Hardy kale/  brussel spout cousin/

useful cabbage / practical leaf.  How many
travelers carried a cutting

or seed with what little they had
& rooted & tended & made it keep living?

Mine makes me live too:
Instructs me:  persist. 

In dark New Year’s day rain,
I cut soft leaves for old recipes. 

My grandmother simmered hers with vinegar, pork fat—
but they’ll be delicious with what you have to hand—

garlic, cumin, broth.
On the stalk or the counter, they are patient, they last. 

Aren’t fussy, won’t rot.  Stay tough
until you turn them tender. 

Tell me: Do you know someone like that?
You bring salt:
                           They bring the iron
they drank from the earth.