Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader Abigail McFee introduces Kristene Kaye Brown’s “Why I Stopped Watering the Plants” from our Spring 2021 issue. You can purchase it here.
“A body that hungers is a body that hopes,” begins Kristene Kaye Brown’s “Why I Stopped Watering the Plants.” I believe, in this entrance to the poem, that hunger might be a kind of salvation. The speaker learns to cook what seemed inedible, flowers bloom like hellos, in the garden there is bigness and dreamy tomatoes. I trust this speaker, whose stubborn desire has brought them into the garden. But I already know, from the title, that the garden is a fleeting promise. As drought unfolds, the earth requires more than the speaker can give.
Though Brown’s poem is written in couplets, her use of spacing and indentation cultivates an organic form—albeit one beholden, like the speaker, to walls and absences. Internal spacing creates a sense of lapsing, the way summer heat can slow time. Indentation visually tugs the two lines of a couplet away from one another, mimicking the poem’s tensions:
“pulling the foundation
away from the house.”
It is not unusual to read the garden as metaphor, so what allows Brown’s poem to stir new and arresting resonances? I’m struck by the emotional force of lines that emerge from within themselves: “It is in desperation that superstition grows. / And still the body thins and the earth // asks for more.” I am struck, also, by the function of the title as spoiler. I enter the poem already knowing the outcome. The speaker gives up, stops watering the plants. But I invest myself, anyway, in the speaker’s hunger, their tireless project, their desire for the beauty of the past to return—even though the speaker and I both know it is a lost cause. By the time the poem concludes on its dual note of resignation and longing, I, as reader, have been taken on the speaker’s same journey: from foolhardy hope to recognition of loss.
Why I Stopped Watering the Plants
A body that hungers is a body that hopes.
This summer I learned to cook
what I thought was inedible
earth, stewed petunias, steamed
sunflowers. Each bloom an edible hello.
There is still so much bigness
in the garden. A summer of drought
and the stubborn tomatoes get dreamier
by the day. All summer
there has been a general sense of wind,
but no real gusts. All summer
there has been an invisible heat
pulling the foundation
away from the house.
For hours I have stood
watering stone walls. It is in desperation
that superstition grows.
And still the body thins and the earth
asks for more. It is never enough.
What I thought was devotion
was nothing more than cracked dirt
skimmed with seed. I’ve come to realize
it’s resisting that erodes.
This morning I watched the trees
rally the wind
as if stunned by the sky’s expanse.
Air smelling of sage. And still,
the memory of what used to be
presses into me like a promise of rain
that’s never coming back.
