Wild Garlic

Wild garlic is not a pretty flower.

Two leaves, a white stalk, and a smell

as if the earth had opened its mouth and breathed into you.

A trembling taste, almost onion,

and your tongue can’t decide whether to defend itself or ask for more.

But when you hold it under the kitchen tap,

knock the clods of dirt from the stray root,

lay it under the knife and start to cut,

the whole apartment turns to March.

Every March you go back into the forest,

up the wet hillside where the beeches stand bare

and a green you can smell before you see it

floods the ground between the trunks.

You kneel in the leaf-litter. The cold comes up

through your knees; your fingers go red and clumsy in the mud.

You know the two soft leaves from the lily that mimics them and keeps its poison —

a thing you were shown once, by hands that are not in this wood,

though you feel them in your own as you work down around the bulb

and lift what survived all winter in the dark, patiently.

That evening you eat it raw, the soil still on your hands,

and the dark it kept goes down into you, and stays.