Under The Walnut Tree
The hole is already dug.
The dirt is piled beside it.
I am holding the box.
It is walnut, cut, quartered and dried.
Above me is the tree this box didn’t get to be.
She is a hundred years or more.
She is not watching.
She is doing what she does each year,
which is to let go —
soft thuds in the grass to my left,
others behind the folding chairs,
myriad hulls splitting green where they land,
that smell of turpentine and rind.
Nobody turns around to see,
this miracle so mundane:
how a walnut tree gets a child.
She cannot plant. She has no hands.
She opens, and they drop,
and the ground is on its own after that.
I have only one -
a walnut of my own
I have hands.
The hole is dug.
Here is what I did not want to learn about seeds:
the shell does not survive.
It splits. It gives up its meat.
Whatever comes up is fed on the body of what went down,
It neither remembers the shell,
Nor is the shell.
Our sons are tall. They are not him.
They are what he was spent on.
He fed them. He fed us.
I kneel. The dirt is cold
and smells fetid.
I place him hesitantly in the hole,
no drop, no thud.
But above us she lets go
of another, and another,
and will keep letting go until the frost —
unbothered, profligate,
sure of nature’s math:
hundreds.
I had only one.
I cover him with a blanket of dirt.
My hands are stained to the wrist
and I will not wash for days.
