Phaseolus vulgaris
Fifty years after Columbus, the bush bean
appears in Leonhart Fuchs’ great herbal,
de Historia Stirpium
Four hundred sixty six years later
I’m on my knees before
these small boats, Ambra variety.
Quick-finger gathering, I’m
picking green beans
that look like canoes
and grew here before Leonhart Fuchs
wrote his organized, accurate, glossaried,
beautifully illustrated botanical text.
Here, in my adopted state,
in this native country—with which
I’ve had such a complex and glowering
relationship, but that was with the country
not the land—
here I am, knees in the dirt
picking beans
that are so sweet
I’m not sure I can dill them
the way Mary taught me
the summers we picked Pioneer beans
with our toddlers, young women now, in tow:
paper bags full of beans to overflow
into hot jars with a garlic clove,
a sprig of dill, a certain number
of peppercorns. The wiping of rims,
the simmering of lids, the hot
brine of vinegar water and salt,
releasing bubbles (stir
of chopstick in hot jar).
The canner steaming like danger, like a thrill
boiling for its jars, submerge
the jars, tong them into their artful cage
and sink them down
the water flattens
don’t look don’t watch
it will boil again as long as
you don’t
check.
It boils.
Thermal magic:
hoist the artful cage and tong those jars—
everything is cleaned up now, the clean towel
is awaiting its jars—
and you set them down
like eggs
and later, moving through the kitchen
hear the gentle pop, the sleepy
smack of lips as the jaw drops open
only these are lids snicking down
on the dilly beans
that Mary taught me to make.
Not thousands of years ago, when the bean vine was holy here,
not hundreds of years ago when the first plants of the New World came
to change the Old.
Not even fifty years ago,
because I’m forty-four—it was just a
teen-agers’ lifespan ago—
and even when I am fifty
the toddlers won’t be the age we were
when we knelt in the Pioneer beans.
Not quite, not quite.
