April: “Roots”

After Jamie Wyeth

• Whan that April with his showres soote
• The droughte of March hath perced to the roote...
• —Chaucer

• Down a ravine, the first fool flush of spring
• Is always brown. The ice-carbuncled ground
• Breaks down, roiling and sifting, revealing
• An old oak’s tense, textured system of roots,
• Like cut-away illustrations of sound
• Found in schoolbooks, tied up in bolted knots
• Of depth and shape, escaping beyond

• Limits of either. Down the rucked ravine,
• The waters rise like a fortune to come,
• The kind blown in with sudden rain; between
• Fox kit’s noisy eviction (that one night
• In early spring) and skunk kit’s chronic home-
• Lessness, a sheltering thatch of root,
• Nested with clotted stone, begins to roam

• Outside topsoil’s loamy island, masted
• With a trunk, its each branch, a windy spar.
• Below deck, the rusty clay, ruby-hued,
• Grips thigh-boned runners, gasping as they creak,
• And spells out tubers with fossilized char,
• As April waits adventitiously to break
• In waves as well over elm as larkspur...

• To say that roots have a system is to say
• Rain is symmetrical or Shakespeare is
• Grammatical. But either way,
• Our words don’t dig down deep enough
• To tap the complexity — ours or nature’s —
• For elements to take sufficient hold of,
• Exhaling rain, sunning earth. Sure, Chaucer’s

• April may very well engender flowers —
• But only the thirsty taproot empowers.

Joseph O’Brien is poetry editor of the San Diego Reader.