Michael Borich

Scallions

I’m kneeling to the snap beans and snow peas and early
   Girls whose pale breasts swell behind their foliage,
And I bless the firm stalks and flowering roots, and I

Curse the eyeless borers and nits and leaf rot and airborne
   Plagues and moles, those tunneling, underground rats,
And I curse all aphids and cutwoms—feast on the turnips

And rotten squash, I don’t care, but not my brandywines,
   Not my California wonders or new hybrids or the muscatels,
Which already seem infected, not the sweet Kennebecs and

Buttercrunch, not this carefully plotted soil this summer.
   I will offer up my stubborn kohlrabi or a row of leeks
Or even a bunch of scallions if the robbers will flap farther

Down the road where the melons look like ripening soccer balls
   And the corn in its silky coverlets, its surgary kernels,
Will make the jays delirious with lust. I’m giving up on

The pie tins and wire mesh and quack remedies for keeping
   Pest free and for traumatizing the rabbits and raccoons.
I’ll be my own demented scarecrow, if I have to, weathering

The cancerous sun and feeling queasy from lack of sleep and
   Cawing my blasphemies and wielding my razor-sharp hoe,
My rake with its filed-down tines, my .38 caliber nozzle,

My fifty-foot hose, my coiled hose, my two blistered hands,
   My feet, knee deep in mulch, and my teeth, my
Incisors, my molars, to rip flesh and kill, if necessary.

MICHAEL BORICH teaches at Southwest Missouri State University, in the heart of the Ozarks, and in the summer transforms into an itinerant poet, selling broadsides and chapbooks of poetry door-to-door.

“Scallions” appears in our Winter 2001 issue.

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