Mounding Potatoes

Weeks past the snapping turtles’ annual
trek from pond to field to lay their eggs,
and after the first stirrings of paper wasps
building nests in the woodshed,
I mound handfuls of earth around
the new potato stalks, dirt still cool
if you scrape through the sun-baked crust
and sometimes worms, like the living
earth itself, they duck and squirm to avoid
me or the light. It’s a strange way to grow
food, covering the greens so pale starch
can swell in darkness. At night
I sometimes sit out back, reading or drinking
under bats, their sonar calls finding insects
in the murk. Mosquitoes needle-nose my arms,
escape full of blood before I feel them.
Some needs I understand, like the mosquito
or the bats, or the way turtles protect
their tender insides with a bone shield
so heavy it makes them slow victims to cars.
In the earth potatoes grow like poems
in my head, large and misshapen
by rocky soil and long days. I love
the people I love, but don't know
what's in the dark parts of them.
By fall I’ll push back the dirt, see what
summer and waiting have made,
some mishandled by solitude, scarred
by too much time alone.

Grant Clauser is the author of five books, mostly recently Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven (winner of the Codhill Press Poetry Award). Poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review, and others. He works as an editor in Pennsylvania, and teaches at Rosemont College.

Published June 15 2022