Radishes
A poem on gardening, rain, and holding thunder in your hands
Friends,
Most mornings when I’m having a quick protein shake or chomping on some toast, I’m already launching into the day’s worries, plotting a course between zoom meetings and to-dos. Often, that means that by 9am, I’m already feeling overwhelmed—not by the day’s work, but by the pressure I put on myself to get it all done and to be a kind, functioning person along the way.
I work with a remote team at a research firm, and that means we all rely heavily on calendar apps to navigate four time zones during a work day. And while I’ve gotten better at time management, the precise productivity of Google calendar can quickly get out of hand (“Oh, I’ve got time here, let me schedule 3 back-to-back hour meetings…”). On those days, I end work with a pixelated mind, bouncing from task to meeting to task to email and back again. I’m relearning to slow down, to take deep breaths, to walk around, to remember I have a body, to take breaks. Productivity, it turns out, can be a great way to skim across the surface of life and lose track of its depths.
That’s one reason I keep returning to poetry—to slooooowww down. To take my mind off of being productive and instead remember how to actually see and hear and taste and smell and feel. We’re not just brains floating through space. No: we have bodies with senses, and there’s embodied, sensual knowing that can only happen there. April is National Poetry Month, so for the next few weeks we’ll be exploring poems that can ground us in this embodied wisdom. In his book The Art of Description: World into Word, Doty says,
When words are tuned to their highest ability, deployed with the strengths the most accomplished poets bring to bear on the project of saying what's here before us—well, it's possible to feel, at least for a moment, language clicking into place, into a relation with the world that feels seamless and inevitable. . . . At that instant when language seems to match experience, some rift is healed, some rupture momentarily salved.
This is what he's after in poetry, and what we’re after too—to find language that points us back into the world where our sense of isolation and exhaustion might be, if not healed, at least momentarily salved. And you don’t have to go far to find it it either. In Doty’s poem below, pulling radishes out of his garden leads him into one of these embodied, intimate moments. So with that, let’s read the poem in one go (I encourage to you read it out loud if you’re comfortable doing that), and you’ll find my close reading afterward.
Take care,
Michael
“Deep Lane” by Mark Doty Trying to pick radishes before the rain begins, though the verb’s not right; pick’s a quick and singular jab of an action, when what’s required is to squat and peer among the ragged leaf‐towns for dome‐tops risen dusty ruby or scarlet, eggshell or violet, and then to grasp the whorl at the base and yank upward, lightly, so the whole plant lifts in a sweet‐scented loose clump. good mineral dirt falling from the white roots and the accomplishment at their center: jewel‐toned Russian somehow, artful, varied, contradicting Leonardo, who wrote that nature does nothing unnecessary; how would he account for this two-toned cylinder, voguish red giving way, near the tip, to a ghost-swath of muslin… Then the first unsettling rumble through the spatter that’s begun to muddy then wash our hands, gathering body until it suddenly seems to pass, like a wave, through the clutches of radishes we’re holding, and then we can feel it, in our own hands: the force that rings the air, drives through silt possibility from nothing into wet dirt-speckled presence: the two impossible bundles of thunder we’re holding.
Trying to pick radishes before the rain begins,
though the verb’s not right; pick’s a quick and singular jab
of an action, when what’s required
We're with the speaker in his garden, probably by the side of his house. In the first line, he sets up an expectation, maybe even a slight anxiety: he needs to pick those radishes before the rain comes so he doesn't get wet. But since a poet's job is to obsess over words, "pick" doesn't cut it—in fact, there's a whole world of actions within that four-letter word, and Doty wants us to look closely at them.
is to squat and peer among the ragged leaf‐towns
for dome‐tops risen dusty ruby or scarlet, eggshell or violet,
Picking a radish starts with surveying the garden, looking for the right stems. And it's not just leaves and dirt, he uses that unexpected phrase "leaf-towns," an image that jolts the imagination—who lives in these towns? What small bugs? What about photosynthesis, light inching through each cell of the plants, powering the whole landscape like electricity in a city? Doty telescopes the size of a city to his garden, and we imagine with him how it teems with unseen life.
and then to grasp the whorl at the base and yank
upward, lightly, so the whole plant lifts
in a sweet‐scented loose clump.
There's so much music here with the repeating "l" consonant. Try reading it again to notice them. I wonder if he's adding them into this stanza to emphasize how "picking" a radish is actually a delicate action. At least, as I read it there's a sense of tenderness, like he's not picking out cereal at the grocery store—he's lovingly taking something out of the earth.
good mineral dirt falling from the white roots
and the accomplishment at their center: jewel‐toned
"Accomplishment" is a fascinating word choice. It's a bit clunky to me, but it does allude to this idea of process, that the radishes were the miraculous result of processes that this gardener is now implicated in. It's also worth noting the colors so far: white, dusty ruby, scarlet, eggshell, violet—they all help us picture this moment in our minds, like giving paint for our minds to use as we imagine the scene. "Jewel-toned" adds even more with its precious luminescence.
Russian somehow, artful, varied, contradicting Leonardo,
who wrote that nature does nothing unnecessary;
how would he account for this two-toned cylinder,
Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his notebook, "Though human ingenuity may make various inventions which, by the help of various machines answering the same end, it will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting, and nothing is superfluous, and she needs no counterpoise when she makes limbs proper for motion in the bodies of animals." The poet disagrees here, and with a quick reference he places this whole moment in the garden in centuries-old debates about beauty and meaning. Doty offers the radish as a counterpoint to the belief that the meaning of nature is in its usefulness and efficiency. This beautiful moment in the garden is completely unnecessary, something utterly un-deterministic and useless. For the poet, that the natural world overflows with useless beauty is cause for wonder, a counterpoint to the belief that the world is without any transcendent meaning.
voguish red giving way, near the tip,
to a ghost-swath of muslin…
Here, the poet's draws his focus into a focused point, describing a barely visible outer layer of the radish. It makes me want to pick one up and take a look—I don't think I've looked at a radish close enough to notice this. Also, "ghost-swath of muslin" is just fun to say.
Then the first unsettling rumble
through the spatter
that’s begun to muddy
I think what's going on here is the rain has started? The distant thunder rumbling, the spatter of rain drops, the dust becoming mud.
then wash our hands, gathering body
until it suddenly seems to pass, like a wave, through the clutches
We're inside the house now, and the poet and his partner are washing their hands and radishes in the sink. But what's "gathering body"? So far, we've only looked carefully at some vegetables. The action could've been done and over with, and we could already be at the table with sliced radish on buttered bread, but the poet slowed us down, and now things get a bit mystical. What's "gathering body" is not the radishes but "the first unsettling rumble." Thunder rolling in the distance becomes a kind of felt presence in the kitchen. What gives?
of radishes we’re holding,
and then we can feel it, in our own hands:
the force that rings the air,
The "rumble" moves from the distant sky to the garden to the kitchen to our very hands: it's "the force that rings the air," or as the poet Dylan Thomas said, "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees." In other words, Doty could be alluding to the biological processes making life possible: the rain brings life to the garden, the radishes bring life to the poet, and, in a way, the "force that rings the air" is not only in the distant air but in his very hands as he holds the vegetables. The poet is trying to give us a sense of intimacy with life itself, that the rumble, this force, this "ringing" (notice the musical imagery) is a deep and pervasive reality we're all participating in.
drives through silt possibility from nothing into wet dirt-speckled presence:
the two impossible bundles of thunder we’re holding.
In just a few lines, Doty reviews the themes of the whole poem: we started with the nothingness of routine gardening, and now we're with him in the kitchen, holding two "impossible bundles of thunder" that connect us to the living world. So are you convinced? We might not have a mystical encounter with the next squash or watermelon we see, but I'm grateful for a poem like this. Doty makes me wonder where my own food comes from and helps me become more aware of the processes that connect our own bodies to the landscapes around us—and how we might become more aware of them in the future.
The Lessons of Objects: An Interview with Mark Doty
“The Insight of Interbeing” by Thich That Hanh
This was a delight.
Wonderful poem! For me it all took place in the garden, with the rain washing the hands.