for Christopher Bursk

You dug in the earth
with fingers like pitchforks.
Your hands were small, slender, 
with fingers hard and bent,
scarred and caked like
old garden tools.

Your hair: blackened straw
in a winter wind.
Narrow chest and
thin torso: if it
weren't for your eyes
I'd have thought you were fragile.

Your eyes 
transmitted intensity
to your fingers, 
a direct connection,
almost as if your body
weren't even there.

Your fingers probed the ground.
They sifted and turned.
They dragged furrows,
pulled weeds, and incubated
fragile stems of brightness  
and nourishment.

And I?
I was rocky ground.
Resisting Levertov
and Roethke,
sneering at Shakespeare
and difficult assignments.
I thought I could grow
by my own glory,
living without 
water or sunlight, 
or those relentlessly probing
fingers and eyes.

I remember your
restless striding,
how you seemed
like a sleek animal
caged in a classroom,
teaching 8 o'clock poetry
to students still fighting
last night's beer or quaaludes.

Your feet could have dug furrows
in that wooden flooring,
every creak an intrusion
at eight o'clock.

Christopher, gardener,
the ground softens slowly,
but finally, it allows itself
to be stabbed and turned,
probed for roots and 
fertilizer, for the lime
and the foreign seed.

Christopher,
gardener,
your tools
are your hands
and your heart
and our minds.
You do your 
very best work
on your knees.

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