The Dirt, and: One Week after the Election Wendy Barker (bio) The Dirt A neighbor across the street has paved over his whole front yard. Easier to hose off the dog shit,he says. No dirt in the house, no need to scrape his feet at the door. But dirt isn’t only filth, nastystuff. It’s the soil our spinach and potatoes grow from. In the Bible, the first human’s name:Adam, meaning earth. And the latest “dirt” on dirt—we’re running out. That’s the skinny, ourdirt’s grown skinny. From the Koran: “They tilled the soil and populated it in greater numbersto their own destruction.” All this year our own neighborhood’s been surrounded by earth movers,clanking, beeping machines: wheel loaders, dump trucks, bulldozers, back and forth over acres offormer woods, native grasses, the live oaks and juniper already chain-sawed down and hauledoff. Flattening the ground to make way for another pharmacy, another body spa, nail salon,more storage units. Scrape it up. Skin of the earth, soil. The interface between rocks and plants andanimals, including us. The poet Roethke: “God bless the ground, I shall walk softly there.” I guessmy neighbor’s never read Roethke, would think his poems just “horse pucky,” not realizing howanimal feces nourish the earth. In 1916, Vladimir Simkhovitch argued that lack of dirtcaused the decline of the Roman Empire. Even Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, writing in [End Page 22] ad 60, noted that Rome’s agricultural problems were due to farmers’ poor treatmentof the soil. I remember the mud pies we made as children, feet sloshing in sloppy dirt. And ourparents smiled. Shall I tell the neighbor about the new process called “earthing”? Simpleenough, you let your bare feet walk on some bare ground. I need to do this. Dirt, we’venow learned, contains antidepressant microbes that cause serotonin levels to rise, isbetter than Prozac, and with no side effects. One Week after the Election November 2016 I’m in the er with my husband, a kidney stone, it turns out, stuck up there,no seed from which anything but pain can grow. Stone sober, they say,and is he ever, grimacing between a rock and a hard place. Too bad he doesn’tdrink—a little bourbon might help. For days I’ve been rereading Yeats,“Easter 1916”: “All changed, changed utterly.” Stoney, rocky. But no rockto lean on. The doc now says my husband’s kidney stone might be too bigfor him to pass. “The stone’s in the midst of all,” says Yeats. Nectarine,apricot pits: seeds like stones, swallow one of those, you’re in trouble. Butplanted in good dirt, seeds can press down furry white roots, send out pale [End Page 23] green stems, leaves, then flower, fruit again. Sweet flesh surrounding the seed,the pit. I need to focus more on fruit, stop keening over this election. Can’tlet it harden me to stone. How I wish I could inject some kind of power-packed seed into my husband’s kidney stone, let it sprout roots, stems that wouldunfurl, splinter his stone into minuscule motes to drop out of his sweetbody, join the pebbles and stones we’ll step on as we walk to the car for me todrive him home, where we’ll munch on peaches, biting gingerly to avoid the pit. [End Page 24] Wendy Barker Wendy Barker’s sixth collection, One Blackbird at a Time, received the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and was published by BkMk Press in 2015. Her fourth chapbook, From the Moon, Earth Is Blue, was published by Wings Press in 2015. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2013. Recipient of nea and Rockefeller fellowships among other awards, she teaches at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Copyright © 2017 University of Nebraska Press