Roots by Benjamin Balthaser

You pull the turnip from the black,

almost frozen ground and show me

the roots, still unshrouding from

their wet tangle of soil. They startle,

 

these dense webs, they aren’t

tentacles or long spindly arms — the roots

feather forth, ghostly, like the white fans

of fish at the bottom of oceans. Ever since

 

your new job out on the oil fields,

you tell me it takes you until

your first coffee to remember

where you are, the room dark,

snow in the slump of concrete bricks

that marks the lot behind your kitchen window.

It’s like swimming in a strange bay,

you say, you don’t know when

you will reach the shore. You hand

me the turnip and even after

I rinse it I can taste the soil, dark,

fibrous, like a shred of night

 

we swim through, awakened daily

from the blue trench of sleep. You wonder

what it would be like for your

bewilderment to last all day, to spend

a life fanning the night in front of you,

imagining you are always somewhere

new, just finding your way, even as your invisible

fins circle you even more firmly in place.

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Benjamin Balthaser is author of Anti-Imperialist Modernism (UMich Press 2016) and Dedication (Partisan Press 2011). His critical and creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, American Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, Minnesota Review, Poetry International, and elsewhere. He teaches 20th C American literature and poetry writing at Indiana University, South Bend, and lives in Chicago.