In response to today’s Morning Porch entry. For Netsuke, see the Wikipedia.
Miterwort
Mitella diphylla
After pollination, the flower cup
turns into a blunderbuss,
expelling its tiny seeds
when a raindrop strikes.
Was it this, or the flower’s
fringe of white feathers,
that made the Iroquois think
they could drink a decoction
& rid the body of bad luck,
expel it in their vomit?
Sometimes, too, they’d use it
to bathe a gun that didn’t
bring down game
or ease one drop
into a sore eye,
surgical as the tongue
of a halictid bee reaching
between the lashes.
Forager
Icicles at sunrise: no even-toed ungulates
come plodding to the cherry, therefore.
But a titmouse lands there, the peachy-
brown streak in her breast the same rust
in a tree sparrow’s cap or a broomsedge stem.
Some days are copper-lined, are meat and wine
and crackling logs the little match girl strikes
flint after flint to enter. I’d take her hand
and sit her on our laps, wrap her in a tufted
comforter. Small songbird, acrobatic forager,
you’ve buried your hoard of morsels so long
in the ground— pine and beech, oak, fruit
of the candleberry. My desire is also quietly
eager for spring. Nothing much yet on the ground—
but pry open the secrets in each gravelly seed;
carry them aloft, bear some to the one I love.
—Luisa A. Igloria
01.17.2011
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
Spring Beauties
Claytonia virginica
Prim pink pinstripes
beckon from the wet soil
beside the creek. But like
most beauties, they’re choosy
about their suitors,
unmoved except by just
the right bee visiting
in just the right order:
one day they hokey-
poke their stamens out;
the next, it’s the pistel’s turn.
Petals close even for a cloud.
And when flowering’s done,
they do their best
to pass for grass.
Who wouldn’t be wary
with such a large
& edible heart?
*
This is the first of what I hope will be a series of poems about spring wildflowers native to eastern North America, in response to macro photos by naturalist and blogger Jennifer Schlick. Even though Jennifer calls herself WinterWoman, and I’m quite fond of the season too, I figure a few of you might be ready to think spring thoughts…
Siphonophore
Three thousand feet down where
an unmanned vehicle probes
the ocean like an endoscope,
a sudden carnival float ripples
into view: Siphonophore!
The scientists all rotate toward
the monitor, open-mouthed
as shepherds at the hush of wings
not grown for any air we know.
Siphonophore. Free of all
hard parts, including that nugget
the self. Corporate being
whose members are truly members—
co-dependent, specialized
as organs in a body, most
made of clear gelatinous tissue
through which, lurid as a sunrise,
the digestive apparatus winds.
Some species can reach
130 feet in length. They glow
blue or green when disturbed—
or fly to pieces, some so delicate
a cone of light alone can shatter them.
They’re almost impossible to collect.
What do they tell us, these prodigies
whose motion is a music,
weightless & translucent as
the dreams of birds?
That life is a conversation
matter is having with itself?
That cooperation at the highest level
is indistinguishable from genius?
All are predators.
Their apparitional tentilla wave
or glow to lure prey—those
so foolish as to possess central
nervous systems—into the range
of poisonous harpoons.
Biotic hacks
An otherwise leafless tulip-tree sapling in the yard still holds five or six leaves, curled and sewn into moth cocoons: a simple yet elegant biotic hack. (Update) This is most likely the work of the promethea silkmoth, Callosamia promethea.
Many of the dried goldenrod stalks display a more destructive repurposing, the work of a midge known as Rhopalomyla solidaginis which lays its eggs in the terminal bud and restricts all further growth to that point, where its fat larva feeds and may be joined by midges of other species in search of shelter.
A inflorescence may still emerge from the cluster, but much of the time there’s only the hack’s faux flower, a beautiful fuck you to the Canada goldenrod.
Less destructive is the goldenrod ball gall, winter home of a fly larva, Eurosta solidaginis. The adult which emerges in the spring is said to be a poor flyer, and only lives a couple of weeks — long enough to mate and inject its eggs into a young goldenrod stem. It is the larva that then produces the chemical instructions to grow a globular home in the plant’s core.
Wake
What remains, what rises early to the surface of the world— Handkerchiefs of snow on the cobblestones; overhead, the thin plume written by a jet lost to sight. The eyelash curl of a tilde over the “n” in a name I used to have. Hedges unhooked from the foliage. Brown runnels in the soil. Flamenco music raining little hands of silver from a high window. Flecks of ash on the staircase, disappearing on the sixth floor landing. Palm print on a cafe window. Ink traveling from a page of newsprint to the doorknob, whose muted note of brass gilds your image in reverse.
—Luisa A. Igloria
01.03.2011
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
Memento Mori
It begins as a thread,
a voice lost above the descant of water.
We stop what we are doing in the kitchen
and lean toward the window, look out
where frozen trees rasp in the wind.
A wingbeat carrying
the gathered sound of a hundred things.
I think of a song I once heard about
a dictator, and the man he made to scrape
the strings of a fiddle with his fingernails.
Last night’s icicles
glint like daggers from the eaves.
One for each tiny hair that prickles on your nape:
count them if you can, then sing along— bodies in the river,
bodies sighing under a blanket of grass.
—Luisa A. Igloria
12.28.2010
(for the victims of the Ampatuan massacre; and for all who have gone missing, or have suffered and perished, from any form of state or political repression)
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
Heart and Shadow
Each day’s a letter
from the unknown.
Yesterday’s missive
came on a plate
of beaten silver.
Today, the hollows
brimming with shadow
are legible. The only
comfort, a fox
squirrel crossing the yard,
its tail a mellow flame
floating in its wake.
—Luisa A. Igloria
12.22.2010
In response to today’s Morning Porch entry.
Solstice meditation
I’ve always felt a little sorry for the sun because it cannot cast a shadow.
What does it have to remind itself of its own eventual death?
What would the henge builders say about a god who never eats and a people who no longer believe in sacrifice?
What would the ancestors make of our craze for the living dead?