Shindofuji in Urban Gardens
we are told to eat food grown near home.
the rationale is more than environmental –
endemism couples body with soil, and so we become
our path to belonging – land is
the site of the birth, the continuing, the death –
not a moment elapses
when our story is not written in the ink of
minerals and elements at hand – we are, literally, where we live.
and this honey salve tars the body and enters the mind
through the blood. but what we are not told is
the beds are raised, moveable,
itinerant, the stories garbled among the newspaper shreds
hail from everywhere but here –
place of no stories – some other earth
bagged, trucked in, substituting our own, which is ruined,
the coffee grounds began in Africa.
consider, those blue tarpaulin sheets
protect us from the perils of home.
the wooden pallets must originate in
distant forests, now unreadable encryptions in the grain
because this is a treeless city
ornamented with sculptures of swinging fists.
so, what does it mean to partake of nature
that is us, but not us? we are trying
everything, but according to the ancient precepts
what we grow is our own estrangement,
what we dip our nibs in is ink that vanishes
so that the simplest stories require expensive, cold apparatus
just to be read, though birth and death
go unchanged. but do we trust the ancients?
in truth, they are not so old after all, not so old.
better to stand upon toxic ground than to fly.
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