The Broad Bean Sermon
Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade
without belief, saying trespass against us in
unison,
recruits in mint Air Force dacron, with unbuttoned leaves.
Upright with water like men, square in stem-section
they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways,
kink down and grow up afresh, with proffered new greenstuff.
Above the cat-and-mouse floor of a thin bean forest
snails hang rapt in their food, ants hurry through several
dimensions:
spiders tense and sag like little black flags in their
cordage.
Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you
find
plenty, and fetch them. An hour or a cloud later
you find shirtfulls more. At every hour of daylight
appear more than you missed: ripe, knobbly ones,
freshy-sided,
thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered,
boat-keeled ones,
beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at
suck,
beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing
fingers
in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your
notice
that the noon glare or cloud-light or afternoon slants will
uncover
till you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or
do they form in an hour? unfolding into reality
like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught
expressions,
like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string
and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,
the portly, the stiff, anf those lolling in pointed green
slippers ...
Wondering who’ll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with
happiness
– it is your health – you vow to pick them all
even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.
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