Ohio Mud
       

As dirt it was silt-fine, soft on your forefinger
like talcum powder, like something sold
over a glass counter. But you'd come out
after hard rain to a jelly, solid but with a wobble—
and hot when the sun hit it. On one occasion,
I reached in with my hand, surprised
to find myself forearm deep in the ground
as if the ground had become an organ
that could receive me. And it felt on my palm
and the underside of my arm like I was
being received, welcomed into the earth.
Anything could grow in that medium.
That's what I thought. Though you could not
walk the mud fields, you could see them
almost in real time growing: the corn reaching
higher, and—even in my own garden—
pumpkin vines curling, complicating, expanding.
It had been a cow pasture. That's what
the previous owner had said, that for
a hundred years cows had eaten grass
and generated manure out there.
I'd pictured it: as if the land were rising
under them, the cows generating the earth
on which they were rising. But not like
the original earth, something richer.
It was a claim almost impossible to verify,
that the corn grew higher in those acres,
the soybeans bushier. But that's what
the farmer swore: higher than in all
the surrounding fields. As I knelt there, up
to the forearm, nearly releasing myself
into the mud, I believed it, that I was
on the edge of a kind of magic—one almost
not of the earth, though nothing could have
been more of the earth. I was still
in my twenties then; just about everything
had yet to happen to me, and I believed him.

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Copyright © 2022 Benjamin S. Grossberg All rights reserved
from Bennington Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission