The Broad Bean Sermon

Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade without belief, saying trespass against us in unison, recruits in mint Air Force dacron, with unbuttoned leaves. Upright with water like men, square in stem-section they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways, kink down and grow up afresh, with proffered new greenstuff. Above the cat-and-mouse floor of a thin bean forest snails hang rapt in their food, ants hurry through several dimensions: spiders tense and sag like little black flags in their cordage. Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you find plenty, and fetch them. An hour or a cloud later you find shirtfulls more. At every hour of daylight appear more than you missed: ripe, knobbly ones, freshy-sided, thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones, beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck, beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your notice that the noon glare or cloud-light or afternoon slants will uncover till you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or do they form in an hour? unfolding into reality like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions, like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly, the portly, the stiff, anf those lolling in pointed green slippers ... Wondering who'll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with happiness - it is your health - you vow to pick them all even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.