Recently, I wrote about the sublime pleasures of eating locally-grown (in my case, hyperlocally-grown) asparagus and how it evokes memories of my Iowa childhood. I keep a reminder of this personal history close, even when it’s not asparagus season, through a poem I happened across several years ago by Madison-based poet Alison Townsend.

Yesterday, Townsend graciously said I could share the poem with Greengirls readers. A gardener herself, she said she drafted the poem while actually steaming asparagus. Many thanks to her for her generosity!

Asparagus Season

first green it is always
the kitchen
bright stalk in the middle of
so much wanting
I do not know
when it starts
but it does
start
tender as
buds
pushing the dark earth
of my childhood
a door that swings
backward and forward
and always
my grandmother
her farm
and her full hands
those large baskets of giving

^

she offers shoots
furled spears
tentative as
the shape of my own legs
on the white
path of her garden she
sings of spring
life breaking the crust
of the black earth
cracking the deep
mounds of our silence

^

believing it all
I cook asparagus
brief in its season
it is the briefest
but fierce as
lit candles
or the promise of rain
in each forkfull
I lift
rain
and the shape of this wanting
that is so green into
a beginning
a garden
an open mouth

(originally published by Blackbird Press and Poets On)

I first saw them on Sunday morning — the asparagus was up! Way up! Tall enough to pick, in fact. This is the first year I can harvest some of the sun-reaching spears, since they need a few years to get established. But on Sunday, my unusual patience paid off. I can’t remember being so excited to have grown anything since I was a kid with my own gourd patch.

Family theme. My parents and my grandparents both grew asparagus and it always marked the arrival of spring in a tangible, delicious, earthy way.

Several years ago, I bought a collection of letterpress broadsheets that had been printed in by folks at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. I purchased the collection because it contained a poem I wanted to frame and give to my partner. But when I read another poem in the collection, Alison Townsend’s piece called “Asparagus Season,” I realized that I had received a great gift for myself.

For me, asparagus is one of those things that seems to have a direct connection to childhood. Like the smell of Bubble Yum, or Band-Aids, or the first few bars of the Partridge Family theme song.

I framed it and it hangs in our living room. Until Sunday, I had only Townsend’s evocative words to take me time traveling in the way that gardening has great power to do. Now I have words. And asparagus.