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30 Letter to Dave B. with May’s Insatiable Hunger Tagging Along Most of the days have been full of green rain and clouds the color of magnolia petals as they rot back into the emerging grasses. Three weeks ago I planted half the potatoes (white Kennebecs), and just Monday they broke the earth, a salad of leaves sprinkled with clay. The other half (Adirondack reds) went into the earth yesterday. When I stuffed my hand into the burlap sack to draw them out, I discovered some had begun to putrefy. I’ll bet the same will happen to us when the hasp of our bodies is unbolted: old men wrapped in cloth, stuck in pine boxes during the days of dogwood’s white shining, the Judas tree just past. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that above our heads pink and yellow lady’s slippers slide gracefully out from beneath mountain laurel, the world round like wild sarsaparilla’s globe, spinning and spinning, never really going anywhere new, yet full of vengeance and mercy and the most foolish blessings of the new potatoes we’ll harvest in July, boiled, then mashed: a river of butter and milk, salt and sugar, the bitter pepper that makes us gorge ourselves upon this one sweet life. ...

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