Lindsay Wilson

ROOT ROT

Wipe the dust from mother's urn,
I think to myself as I pour
the pickle brine into the Bloody
Mary. The mice in the garden
have eaten their fill of poison,
but still I find the cucumbers
chewed each morning. None
of it will matter if the rain never tires.
The leaves yellowed and spotted
like an illness. The lightning cracks
the black vault open, and as I stand
with my mother's umbrella to keep
the rain from my garden, I squint
with each flash of the storm trying
to find an eye's wink to give the mice
away as they stagger poison-drunk
past the rabbit-proofed fence
into the back field to pass out like me
face first into the wild roses' tattered
confetti of blossoms after the hail's ruin.
When the morning rises to its feet,
only the depressions our bodies pressed
into spring's sharp-edged grasses
will remain, and I will wash the dirt
from my face before I trim the tomato's
yellowing leaves.

Lindsay Wilson, an English professor in Reno, Nevada, co-edits The Meadow. His first collection, No Elegies, won the Quercus Review Press Spring Book Award, and his poetry has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, Verse Daily, and The Minnesota review. He serves on the Nevada Writers' Hall of Fame Selection Committee.