Asparagus

I blame you, Grandmother, for the asparagus I steam tonight

remembering how you sent me to pluck it

from that slope behind your house that leaned

toward the apple orchard.  They were winsap, I think,

and red delicious, never ripe when we visited. 

Snap asparagus at the root, you said, showing me only once,

or was it twice?  I was so young and didn’t use a basket

but grasped them like a bouquet of blue bells.

You snapped them into small pieces, scrubbed

then boiled the life out of them.  I didn’t know until later

how you ruined the taste with water and salt

and remember the asparagus, still, as perfect.

It is your fault, Grandma, the way I blithely believe

Providence will provide an abundance of asparagus and apples.

That crate you sent each fall kept the doctor’s away.

The applesauce, the apple pies and fritters,

they were all sweet.  And so I forgive your dreadful bible verses

and the singsong hymns you tucked us into bed with,

hoping to correct our ill manners,  and to punish us

for playing in the tractor sheds and in fields near the pickers sheds

where we saw just how desolate life could be.  I forgive you

for telling me not to play with the children I played with anyway.

It is your fault, Grandmother, teaching me to pick

the wild green sprouting amidst the dying grass.  I forgive you

for calling me bad seed, for thinking I caused more trouble

than you could ever pray me out of, even after that summer

I sat stalk-still and you painted so much majestic hope into my still life. 

That summer you swatted at the bees settling on the butter,

decreed Satan created them, not you.  Grandma, it is your fault

I think your God is small.  He sinned when he erased our faces

from your memory.  But Grandma, your scripture is worthless

if I am now just some stranger peeling apples at your sink. 

I never want to quit being your last regret, your shinning disappointment.