Posts about herbaceous plants that are not grasses but may be weeds.
200 years old
or ten thousand
former road/streambed
rhododendron trunk
bare as high as a starving deer’s
neck can stretch
elevation measured
by the number of unripe
spikenard berries
slow-creeping slope
all the tree boles curved
to keep their balance
wood nettles
that angry guy who hacked at them
with his hatchet
becoming the place
of my fisher sighting
foamflower patch
the long moment
after it vanished
fishing for its name
wilder hills
and deeper hollows
the fisher’s undulating gait
fallen cucumbertree
the white undersides
of its leaves
roots lost their grip
on the saturated slope
seed pods still clenched
leaf duff undotted
by any black cherries
rained out
that mob of red trilliums
melted away
foam in the stream
among straight ascenders
an ancient grapevine’s
grave accent
the last white asters
the woods are darkest
just before the fall
weak sunlight
witch hazel beginning
to extrude its rays
so green you’d think
it’s still spring
Christmas fern
after failing
this year to blossom
Clintonia leaves
seedhead
the two sterile florets’
showy bracts
the mountain road’s
one straight stretch
turning to look back
headwater stream
a dark and slender
mink’s road
looking for beechdrops’
nondescript stalks
the road down dips up
hollow or holler?
just ’round the bend
the stream falls away
deepening ravine
trees stretched thin
to reach the sky
musclewood
I was that skinny once
standing beside
its toppled twin
cucumber magnolia
beneath the white oak
200-year old charcoal
crumbles from the bank
the bright red club’s
rotten handle
jack-in-the-pulpit
jack or jill
transitioning to female
from the pulpit
its rust-reds and purples
in season at last
corrugated pipe
shelf fungi
growing at right angles
since the tree fell over
with such deep-veined hearts
you’d expect three-winged fruit
wild yam
young hepatica leaves
white hair’s in style now
I hear
another ash I never noticed
lit up by the sun
its death let in
for so many years
I saw it as an eye
island in the stream
don’t call them Indian graves
these mounds
that once held roots
God or microbes
everywhere you look
undiscovered
that gap between
crowns of adjacent trees
and what goes on underground
just one fling
on the way up
fox grape
Solomon’s seal
withered leaves curl around
the glossy black drupe
crustose lichen on a rock
its complex inner life