We turn into an alley, nearing the end of our walk,
and I straggle, sapped, by a massing of lost vines.
Someone has left their garden, a sure, deliberate planting,
spilling into the gravel, bins, a parked car.
Incongruently, panged, I think of a white goal
unmet in an ancient track: mēta. I’ve stopped short;
rancor enriches my throat. That where parents are bowed down,
the elderly hard to their limits, cultivation could hang abandoned.
These grapes are for no one’s taste,
though I’m touching them with my hand,
whose flourishing doesn’t belong, already turning the spokes
of the stroller, my children chiding from their aimless bicycles ahead.
Kjerstin Kauffman
Kjerstin Anne Kauffman is a poet and essayist living in Spokane, WA. Her work appears in The Cimarron Review, The Hopkins Review, 32 Poems, The Cresset, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Latest posts by Kjerstin Kauffman (see all)
- Spells & Structure, Structure, Structure: On C. Dale Young’s Prometeo and Marcia Karp’s If by Song - May 22, 2022
- Jazz & Seraphim: On Grace Schulman’s The Marble Bed - May 30, 2021
- Ponder Each Furrow: On Samuel Menashe’s Collected Poems - February 21, 2021
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