A prose poem about my back yard.

Elaine Elizabeth Belz
PUTTING DOWN ROOTS

Someone who lived here before me

had a taste for the exotic in flowers and vines; or else didn’t care for gardening at all, and simply allowed whatever flora came marauding through the neighborhood to take root. Arriving in winter,

I couldn’t have known—the back yard was bare, shivering under a wilting bed of snow. In April, tilling the soil turned up no signs of plant life. Seeded by decades of postindustrial anthropochory,

the ground gave up a true urban harvest: defiant old nails that should have crumbled into rust by now; pop caps, bullet casings; coins whose value leached into the soil during their lost years; glass and plastic shards; a spade, a rake, a doll. Seed mix and rain coaxed up sparse spring-green sprouts from that mud; meanwhile

shoots appeared abruptly in a small garden space between the fence and the driveway. Within a week, their bamboo stalks could look me in the eye. Japanese knotweed, the internet told me. It can take out your sewer line. Its rhizomes will mangle the very foundation of your home. I cut down and poisoned as much as I could; the rest glared back from the other side of the fence, out of my control. But my neighbors’ problems

are my problems too.

No respecter of property lines,

stink weeds punched up through the soil like zombies’ hands from the grave. Lined up in rows, the weeds seemed to betray their underground lifeline to a parent tree in another yard. Misnamed “tree of heaven,”

it could be Detroit’s official tree. But no Dutch-elm-type disease could take this one out. “Ghetto palms,” some call them. They fill surplus land alongside highways, cluster in vacant lots, sneak up on houses all over the city. They too have designs on your property. Pull one up, it lets go of the taproot, sacrificing itself to preserve the whole. I tracked one half-way across the back yard, then lost its trail. Above ground,

bindweed creeps across grass and dirt, twirls up other plants. When it finds something to hold onto—fragments of old cable wiring; chain-link fence; or, I imagine, the postal worker’s leg—it won’t easily let go. It tried to eat my garage, but I managed to pry it away. Midsummer,

a mulberry tree reaching over the fence from the yard behind the burned-out house next door dappled my lawn with its fruit, no doubt hoping to reproduce itself here. Not all the invaders

intend to cause harm. If only I could herd the benign plants to the back of the yard, organize a pollinators’ garden there. The milkweed that polka-dots the lawn could offer its flowers to butterflies. The goldenrod that reasserted its land rights among my newly planted hostas, irises, and peonies could go there, too, enjoy the flirtations of honeybees in late summer, when other sources of nectar are more scarce. I wouldn’t even mind the lambsquarter if it would stay contained back there. Right now, it wrestles with the new grass between the driveway and the sidewalk. I’ve been told to root it out or,

an online friend urged, cook it up and eat it. I’ve tended to ignore it. The lawnmower levels it along with the grass.

Putting down roots anywhere

means pulling up others. These invasive species seem to be native here, hold a claim to this land at least as strong as mine. But a bank with mere financial stakes in this property holds the deed I’ve yet to see. It details lot and plat by some mysterious code assigned when the area was deemed a neighborhood,

divvied up arbitrarily into rectangles on a map. What does nature know of such abstractions? By force of will and perpetual effort, we humans impose on the landscape our fiction that we are not nature, but masters of it. Zip codes, street names, house numbers divide space

above ground. Beneath the surface, roots entangle, hold living things

in place.

---

Published in Belt Magazine (a journal featuring work by Rust-Belt area writers & writing about the Rust Belt).

In early 2022 I bought a house. This was significant (to me) because it’s the only house I’ve ever bought—and I always thought I would never buy a house.

It was built in 1923, so is 100 years old this year. I wanted to have a party to celebrate that, but I’m not sure in the remaining two months of this year that I will pull that off.

It’s a lovely old house, though it needs a lot of work. It’s on a short block in a decent neighborhood in the middle of nowhere on Detroit’s West Side. By “middle of nowhere,” I just mean there’s not much around here: it’s somewhat industrial, but mostly vacant buildings along the main road that cuts through the neighborhood. But it’s a safe neighborhood—I don’t really worry about break-ins or anything like that.

The prose poem above is nearly 100% true. I simplified a few things: in reality, for example, my sister & her husband brought out a rototiller, tilled the soil (“to “soil” may be a bit generous), and spread grass seeds. My sister also planted the hostas and flowers in a little garden area beside the house.

I honestly don’t remember how I came across the term “anthropochory,” but it was either while I was writing this poem, or just before. Isn’t it perfect for describing all the weird rubble you find in the yard of an old house?

I have a very tall fence—I’m told previous owners had a large dog—and it keeps some of the noxious vegetation at bay. However, branches and vines lean over the fence from my neighbors’ back yard. Their landlord (I assume) has everything cut once a year, I think; although it hasn’t happened this year so far.

[This post is where I probably should explain that my banner image is of a couple branches of Tree of Heaven against the worn wood of—if I recall correctly—the burned-out house next door. Or some other wood somewhere else, I’m not sure.]

---

You may have noticed, if you visited Belt Magazine, that the visual shape of this poem looks quite a bit different. I still haven’t figured out how to send poems to online publishers without my formatting being translated very badly. Normally, in a Word document, I set the paragraphs to have a 6-pt. space after them so that I don’t need to use blank lines in-between stanzas, and I use the soft return (shift + enter) for line breaks within stanzas. Here on WordPress, it seems the 6-pt. space is getting interpreted as a break between what they call “blocks.” It looks like a blank space, but it’s not. I like the way it looks here—it’s similar to how it looks on the page in a Word document, although in Word I often justify the text on both sides in a prose poem so that its structure is more clear. (Other than that, I would never justify to both sides!) Because it’s a prose poem (technically), the majority is just paragraphs, so how the lines break depends on the width of the screen you’re reading it on. There are a few weird little line breaks I put in, because that just feels right to me. I might be trying to make it clear that this is a poem and not simply prose, although I’m not sure it matters.

As with most—all?—prose poems I’ve written, this started as a normal poem. When in the process of writing, I lose the sense of a distinct rhythm in the lines, that’s a clue that I probably should try it as a prose poem.

---

A friend of mine has had success ridding his lawn of “tree of heaven.” (I can’t write that phrase without putting it in quotation marks. It’s just so not true, and I don’t want to seem to affirm it!) Apparently, some time between mid-July and the peak of fall color, you cut little slots in the trunk of the main tree (or drill holes—you just don’t want to make the tree think you’re cutting it down) and pour a particular poison into the trunk. That’s the time of year it’s sending nutrients down into its roots, and it will deliver the poison along with them. If you cut the tree down or make your cuts in such a way the tree might think it’s getting cut down, it will send out more roots. As described in the poem above, these trees/weeds propagate (at least in part) by growing new plants from tap roots sent out from the tree. So if the tree sends poison down its tap roots, it should poison all its little dependent trees/weeds. I rather look forward to trying it next summer. In the meantime, I keep pulling up the little ones, so that at least they won’t be feeding the roots. (I hope it works like that.)