Gardeners who’ve fought Creeping Charlie and
other unwanted plants may sympathize with James McKean from Iowa as he
takes on Bindweed, a cousin to the two varieties of morning glory that
appear in the poem. It’s an endless struggle, and in the end, of
course, the bindweed wins.
Bindweed
There is little I can do besides stoop to pluck them one by one from the ground, their roots all weak links, this hoard of Lazaruses popping up at night, not the Heavenly Blue so like silk handkerchiefs, nor the Giant White so timid in the face of the moon, but poor relations who visit then stay. They sleep in my garden. Each morning I evict them. Each night more arrive, their leaves small, green shrouds, reminding me the mother root waits deep underground and I dig but will never find her and her children will inherit all that I’ve cleared when she holds me tighter and tighter in her arms.
Reprinted from Headlong, University of Utah Press, 1987, by permission of the
author, and first published in Poetry
Northwest, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1982. Copyright
© 1982 by James McKean, whose most recent book is Home Stand, a memoir published
in 2005 by Michigan State University Press. This weekly column is supported
by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of
English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept
unsolicited poetry.
This article appears in Jun 15-21, 2006.
