Radishes

Smoke and ash of November.

A landscape of sediment and char,

lead and gold leaf, mutilated sod

racing on its planetary camber.

On a kitchen table's crude altar

a bowl of radishes is offered

with a dish of salt for dipping whole.

That's how my father would eat them.

My mother sliced them thin.

Theirs was no house in a fairy tale.

Yet the knife that trimmed the stem

and scraped the blemished skin

would halt at her intrepid thumb.

Radishes of rosy cheeks, of snow, 

peppery radishes of yesteryear,

which made my tongue go numb,

why are you so much milder now?

You don't set my mouth on fire.

Did something in your cultivation change,

or does sensation wane with age?

In a French film, I saw two friends

spread butter on radish halves; strange,

I thought, but now it's all the rage

to sauté them. Their trailing ends

clog my drain stopper. Best is raw:

it's "war" backward, like a spell

grown in the cold ground, color

of rose and snow—good to gnaw

a vegetable so filial and feral

late in the year, when the knife is duller.