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Mud Season

Tess Taylor

We unstave the winter’s tangle.
Sad tomatoes, sullen sky.

We unplay the summer’s blight.
Rotted on the vine, black fruit

swings free of strings that bound it.
In the compost, ghost melon; in the fields

grotesque extruded peppers.
We prod half-thawed mucky things.

In the sky, starlings eddying.
Tomorrow, snow again, old silence.

Today, the creaking icy puller.
Last night I woke

to wild unfrozen prattle.
Rain on the roof—a foreign liquid tongue.

Tess Taylor is the author of Work & Days (Red Hen Press, 2016) and The Forage House (Red Hen Press, 2013).

Occasion

Themes

About this Poem

“A few years back I had the chance to move out of Brooklyn and live in Amy Clampitt’s former home in the Berkshires for a full year. We moved in January, and the snow and the freeze were thick. One of the great surprises of getting to live in a rural area and watch its minute changes was the sheer noisy force of spring. The intense cracking and water noises during the first thaws, and the actually unsettlingly loud clatter of the first rain—all of this reminded me that spring has another deep meaning of ‘gush’ or ‘flow.’ By the time this poem was written, I was also working on a nearby farm a few days a week. I hope that the poem, and the book, actually, get at the bodily pleasure, but also the strangeness, of being so close to both the season and the work.”
—Tess Taylor

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More by this poet

Song with Shag Rug & Wood Paneling

My parents renovated that old home.
It is clean as a lobotomy.

The cracked linoleum’s erased.
New hardwood floors are gleaming.

Gone are gold shag rugs the shade
of California August,

on which I lay beneath the dust motes
studying the drift of genome, species, phyla;

gone the shameful faux-wood paneling,
dark embarrassment of my teenage years.

They’ve added a back door to the kitchen
where night after night I fought with my mother—

Tess Taylor

2020

Green Tomatoes in Fire Season

There is smoke in the air
when I go pick them.

I go despite panic, also because
inside I’ll make chutney.

For an hour or so, I unlatch them.
It is late fall. They will not ripen.

Firm pale green skins,
fine-coated in ash.

Our fire season goes all autumn now,
though today’s fire is not

yet near to us.
But the green tomatoes: I love their pale lobes.

Tonight, god-willing,
we will fry some with cornmeal & fish.

Inside the air purifier whirs:
I boil them with molasses & raisin.

Tess Taylor

2023

Eighteenth Century Remains

Albemarle County

The ridge a half mile down from Monticello.
A pit cut deeper than the plow line.
Archaeologists plot the dig by scanning

plantation land mapped field
for carbon, ash, traces of human dwelling.
We stand amid blown cypresses.

Inheritors of absences, we peer
into the five-by-five foot ledge.
Unearthed painstakingly, these shards:

Tess Taylor

2016

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Mud Season

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