Jefferson's Lettuce
Terraced furrows serve the kitchen staff, with oak-leaf lettuce,
purslane, tansy, spearmint, strawberries, chives, and chickpea.
The wide-walk terraces that grace the pillared house and dome
hide laundry (and a laundry-maid), smoking fatback, hogsheads
of beer, a Bordeaux wine cellar, Barbary horse stalls, hay-strewn
lofts for working girls, and an ice house for the winter wheat.
Sorrow, too, grows up from beds of tulips Jefferson calls Oratorio,
Queen of Sheba, Fly-Away, Black Parrot, and Fontainebleau.
The lettuce patch is a three-act play that ends with Lazarus alive.
A thousand apple trees, a vestibule with buffalo-skin sketches
from the Sioux, a map of French West Africa, a gong and clock
with counterweights to tell the day or unravel the Enlightenment.
Along Mulberry Row, porters and sawyers are shadows of a self.
Looking out over blue hills, I get a first glimpse of our democracy.
© 2013