Our Vernix Caesosa: What Keeps Between Us

Our Vernix Caesosa: What Keeps Between Us

                                    after reading Seamus Heaney’s 

                                                  “The Cot”

He uses the word keep like it’s been put up,

it’s been blanched then froze, or boiled and cared

for after their earth’s been split

open again, a dirty 

episiotomy (spell that gently, don’t

hack at it all, clam hoe sunk

row on row into the furrows)

and I have to think of those thick red

rusted fork-tines, fingers shoved

into the dirt up to her handled hip

and grunted on and pulled back, who said

by Jesus going out into reaping

isn’t better than practiced

sex, or putting it all in the first time, coddling

those turnip seeds carrot seeds no bigger

than a baby’s pupil and how conscious

you have to be with the long handled hoe, lifting the sharp

blade the way you might slip under

a broody hen to avoid her beak, her sharp

straight down between the knuckle stab

and congratulate the warm egg, so close

to a new garden’s spring row it’s almost a new-

born, before she’s washed clean of her

vernix, the deep bouquet of the ground

she came out of and nothing interrupts,

nothing’s casual, it will keep it will be kept,

it will, when you hand the land over

to May and wait and tend right on through to

October, the random rains and weeks of brutal

burning sun—oh yes—oh yes, oh yes—come

now, it’s any language’s translation of the Kama

Sutra, chapter this, verse that, look:  Look!:

at the split-heart strawberries in winter.  They’ll be

cream in his mustache and a grin when that pink’s

nearly thawed, all day in the sink

(and the baby’s down for a nap) And it still has

a bit of give, a bit of the firm—yes—oh yes—

they kept.