Planting in Tuscaloosa
for Frances Webb (Callahan) Watkins

Three women are walking in Alabama.
My mother and I help my grandmother walk
around the field where she planted and raised.
As we circle the land I think of the way
a woman with child will sometimes caress her girth.
My uncle's tractor combs the deep red clay.

Now she wears a housecoat.

Summers, I stayed with her and rode the glider
on a shaded porch enclosed by lilacs.
I watched her wave a paper fan printed
with pictures of Jesus in unbelievable colors.
She waved away the sulphur smells that blew
at night from the Warrior River Paper Mill.

Once a man reading Sunday papers
in my bed asked me if I had page twelve;
I said I didn't have it. Then he asked
for page fifty; I said I didn't have it.
Then he asked for page seventy-three
and I said, "Go Fish," and we laughed
for ten minutes and made love and laughed.

Those laughs were courtesy of my grandmother.
She played Go Fish with me for hours,
managing a dumb wedge of cards
while I was mesmerized by learning
the distinctions between diamonds and hearts. 
How could any adult love a child enough
to play a game like Go Fish for hours?

Now she calls us to her room.

Every summer more trees on her land
were covered by the kudzu vines that grew
taller and taller than the tree men with machetes.
A lens on her table magnified the word.
Afternoons, the women snapped beans in Sister's
parlor and watched “As The World Turns” on TV.

Snap. Ping. Into the metal colanders.
I tried always to get the whole string off,
counting how many were right, two, then a goof.
How did she get the beans to snap so,
and always get the whole string off
and watch television and talk all the while?

Now she is heaped with roses and gladiolas.

Two women are walking in Alabama.
My mother and I walk arm and arm in her field.
The tractor harrows and dust begins to rise.
I stand ankle-deep in the field.
I am given her porcelain pitcher to keep.
Bits of clay cling to my feet.

First published in Green (Graywolf Press,1989); revised 2023; anthologized in Working the Dirt, ed. by Jennifer Horne Video: “Planting” read by Jennifer Horne for “Mid-Week Poetry Break”
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