to fall in love with a bundle of kale (far better and more nutritious than any human)

In Brooklyn, another way to fall in love is on Saturday. Look behind you and find Prospect Park, but you don’t even have to make it there. To your left will be the library, but even that can be left for another day. Further on down is the Botanic Garden or even the art museum; leave that for another time too. On Saturday, take someone you feel enamored with or go alone to a place where earth is honored in the most magnificent way. Breathe in the perfume of farmed crops, organic apples, so tiny they can hide inside your palm. Taste the sweet tomatoes that remind you how fruitful they actually are. Sample the locally vinegar’d pickles and fuzzy peaches that tickle the top of your tongue. You notice the attractive farmer with tattooed forearm from the field upstate. You almost buy some leeks, not because you need any, but just to hear her voice again. You purchase a flatbread featuring zucchini, spinach and gorgonzola for you and one you spend this day with. You will call this lunch beneath the hot, August sun. Your heart will remember its musculature, when you take out your ukelele and play music for the ones who birthed all these crops out. Your throat will vibrate poems toward each bundle of kale and those flirty nectarines and the fennel, which calls out to you. This summer is all about the purple eggplant and grass-stained peppers. Although there was quite a bit of loss during these months, you gained recipes and an appetite for kohlrabi and celeriac. You are moved by these plants, which root in the way you want and need to be. 

how sustainable is this.

The day begins with rain. The sky breathes in and out and in. We walk toward the scent of roots and earth. Notice the radishes and it is too late for kale now but that broccoli is something to write poems about. Basil. Beans. When you pop perfectly-circled cherry tomato into mouth, there is a pop. You purchase a small basket of multi-colored tomatoes from a hippie with a tattoo of words from her grandmother. A loaf of bread for later. Some peaches. How beautiful is this. How much will this day cost and what about that time we cried on half of a hill on a Sunday because all of it was ending. But the vegetables never abandon us. We can always rely on the growing pattern of farmers and seedlings to last past love.