Untelling

I’m thinking about throwing away the canned green beans

in their Bell mason jars that line my kitchen window.

They’re from the last time Daddy put out a garden

(two gardens, actually, bookending either side of our house on the hill).

Oh, how many years did he work in the sun, working the red-brown dirt,

until seed-beans grew, curled around wire and cane poles, to make mess after mess.

Almost a decade old now, the jars are quite a mess.

No matter how hungry, I could never bring myself to eat those beans.

The pressure-canned lid seals have weakened; what’s inside is going back to the dirt.

No lambs or open arms of Jesus, but they are a floodwater-color stained-glass window

to outside, to this city where I came to hide, to go crazy, to heal. Recovery is a steep hill.

No matter how wore out he was or how tired, he tended the soil, he still gardened.

In old baskets, ice cream buckets, IGA bags, Daddy brought in bushels from the garden

and Mommy would string, snap them on the porch; between her knees, a mess.

She stood at the sink and washed the Bell jars, looking across the hill

in-between wiping down the lids for all the beans.

Our pressure cooker is wherever the knick-knacks are that lined her kitchen window –

they could’ve been sold for pills, thrown in a junk room, or tossed out in the dirt.

Like so many things, taken when I was looking away, grief deep in my eyes like dirt.

I knew you were sick when, one day, you couldn’t even walk to the garden.

Altar pieces: the Bell mason jars, a salt crock, dried flowers, arranged in my window.

I cry to them when Everything is hard, unfair; every choice I make, a mess.

There is a coolness when you stick your fingers in a pile of dry, shucked beans.

I want to swallow them, hard and raw, even if they’re in a grocery store, not from the hill.

Nothing of me is there yet everything of me is there on the hill

no matter who owns it, who lives there, who logs it, who tills the dirt.

Every time I do dishes, I look at the beans,

I think of the chicken wire cages for tomatoes in the garden,

the vine labyrinth of cucumbers, the bell peppers. I long for one last mess.

I could see it all from my bedroom window.

How important are rotting vegetables in a window?

When Mommy broke her hip, in the snow they carried her down the hill

and never back up again, leaving all of us a mess.

Mouths that did not cry had hands that grabbed before she was even in the dirt.

Life can feel as fragile as the snap of a watermelon picked from the vine in a garden.

Even when you are so tired you want to give up, you go on and snap the beans.

There are dead spiders, dust, dirt on the jars in the window

that hold the last food from my parents garden that grew up on the hill;

It’s a mess, still, but maybe I won’t throw away the green beans.