Turning The Wind Rose \ Planting Her Beans

Nancy: We live spruce and ledge and tide, with the wind as a constant presence.

Turning The Wind Rose

I stay.  The wind comes to me:

today the wind comes with a sound

like palm trees, from the south,

across water from the south,

with a sound of sand against our stone,

a sound of long-needled pines, not

a harsh sound

like wind from the north: that wind

comes and barks at the cracks, the north

wind is ten men beating on the wall

with cudgels; we turn our backs on

the north wind and it hammers us

with fists

but the south wind strikes us

with wings: muscular, feathered;

its sigh in the firs is a long curl

of sea hissing through sand.

I stay.

I stay, and the long, deep fetch of wind,

the south wind, comes to me.

Alan: If we’re lucky, between the cold wet days of spring and the hot dry days of summer (or vice versa), there’s a time of perfect weather to get a garden in.  

Planting Her Beans

The Master Gardener is planting her beans:

bush beans, pole beans, dry beans, scarlet runner beans.

She bends to plant: the breeze catches her purple muumuu,

billows it out and then back in against her hips.

It is purple like nothing else in the garden:

not even the clematis in full bloom can match it.

As she bends, the sun catches her old straw hat,

burnishing the straw, the crushed brim and salmon band.

The Master Gardener is stamping on the beans,

pressing the soil, wearing low slip-on shoes with no socks.

She wears nothing under the muumuu, nothing at all.

The beans know all this.  Already they are softening,

preparing to reach up toward the sun,

up and around her dark ankles and pale calves.