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| "Into" Rebecca Nurse House, Danvers, Mass |
Soaking
While I slept the beans re-
made themselves in the water
in the crock they reached
behind the hull and inside it
and under it to shake the sleeping
green awake. Each little dried kidney
was a stone poured: one
cup one cup into the pot, last
summers: yellow eyes or pea
or Kings of the Early or Jacobs
Cattle wall those possible Elijah’s
sunk beneath the almost
clean town water (and I remember: there was
a man who
down the road
from us threw out
his dead dairy cows
and left them
spent maybe a gurgle
or two in their lungs
drug there by
the bucket loader slung
into his pit of fish his
scheme to sell it
back to the small fry
farmers who
couldn’t afford
commercial fertilizer
almost dry and the reek’s
worse than shit and some-
times because of the leak
in the liner of his great
pits and after a heavy
rain it would seep
and sink down into the ground
water it would make its way
to our faucet to our tea
to our soaking Saturday night
beans put under every Friday
night so long long into the dark
their dry selves could shake off
the rehabilitation the temperance
and shrug and struggle
swell again in all that (some-
times) tainted water.
While I slept the beans
remade themselves they split open
like a head coming down hard
on that last stair, having taken
the fall with the rest of the
body, the foot missing
the second step thinking it’s
it’s, it’s what? Friday night?
That forgetting the soak means
no Saturday night beans? Beans
baked with what sugar we could
scrounge, what water we’d set
to rest before pouring slow so the brown
went to the bottom, and stayed there.
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