Caulophyllum thalictroides

This blue has nothing to do
with sky or any bluebird
any sea. You could dye
your lips this color
if you wanted to look like
the healthiest corpse alive.
(But the roots—it’s the roots
they use for… you know.)
Blue as the past
tense of blow:
flowering past, it leaches
from the glabrous leaves
only to resurface months later
in the berries
bluer than a blue howl.
(What about the roots?)
The maturing seeds rupture the ovary,
Alien-style, & loose themselves
upon the world: a toxic
substitute for coffee.
Choose your medicine.
(Cramps, fits, & hysterics.
Inflammations of the womb.)

Chrysosplenium americanum

The so-called water carpet
forms a creeping mat
over soggy, springy ground,
its flowers so tiny & indistinct
as almost to escape notice,
lacking petals, greenish
except for the red dots
of anthers & the brown
verge of its own
miniscule wetland:
sweet pool for some
lucky gnat.

Cardamine concatenata

Deeply divided
& coarsely toothed,
they say about its leaves,
as if describing some
barbarian horde. Even
the rhizomes sport tooth-
like projections, a root
said to be peppery,
good raw or boiled,
pickled or fermented
until sweet—
in short, a toothsome thing.
The mordellid beetle knows
nothing of this,
perched on a petal’s lip,
drawn in by a fragrance
like nothing from any fetid
snaggle of teeth.

Sanguinaria canadensis

The red juice of its root
has nothing to do with love
& everything with war, caustic enough
to leave permanent scars on the skin,
burn out cancer, repel insects,
& once to give Indian warriors
their fabled hue. But it isn’t just
the blood-red color;
see how the anthers circle
a pale heart. How the tender
young plant embraces itself
like a bat with its one green wing.
Dig up a bloodroot & watch a tremor
travel through the patch,
connected by something
far thicker than water.

So what if Dave wrote poems for these and then Deb made the whole thing into a handmade book?

I clicked on the link and found myself looking at macro photos of 16 native spring wildflowers, almost all of them old friends. Count me in, I said. I’m always looking for good poetry prompts to feed the blog, and these photos were stunners. Somewhere along the line, Jennifer filled in another vital piece of information: that her work was to be featured in a gallery show in Jamestown, New York in May, with frames handmade by a local woodworker. This was a dream whose real-world foundation was already half-laid.

But who wouldn’t jump at the chance to dream of wildflowers in the middle of a long winter? The resulting series, now 24 28 in length with the addition of some photos from Jennifer’s files, includes some of the strongest work I’ve written, which I think speaks to the power of her images. I know from my own dabbling with cameras that photographing woodland wildflowers at all can be a challenge; doing it in such a way as to avoid the easy and the obvious, and draw our attention to the true strangeness of nature, is a feat. These photos compelled me take another look at what had previously been mere fixtures in the landscape, albeit well-loved ones, and to start seeing them as complete beings.

This of course led to research in books and online. For some flowers, it’s the folklore that fascinates, while others’ unique habits or appearances call out for poetic treatment. In my mother’s large library of nature books, I found two old volumes with the same title: How to Know the Wildflowers. Unfortunately, neither book taught what the title promised — since when does mere identification constitute knowledge? But I liked the suggestion that one must learn a method of inquiry specific to flowers. Jennifer herself once wrote:

I can lose hours making my images; an entire day can disappear when I’m in the field shooting. Another day — gone in processing the pictures.

The results surprise me. Where do these images come from? And what do they want me to know?

Unanswerable questions, really, though it’s the job of poetry to try anyway. It would be hard to find a richer subject. Flowering plants are key to most terrestrial ecological communities, and flowers are potent symbols in nearly every human culture. There are more than 300,000 species of flowering plants on earth. Though we speak dismissively of “flowery speech,” as if flowers were mere ornaments, the fact is that without them, we would starve.

The basic fact of flowers’ existence — that they are sex organs — wasn’t understood until the 17th century, and the exact mechanics of flower sex weren’t documented until the 19th century, so for most of human history, poets, along with everyone else, had basically no idea how to know the wildflowers. But now we owe it to ourselves to learn all we can of these most sophisticated and essential of our fellow citizens. Pablo Neruda, an accomplished naturalist, has wowed millions of readers with his line: “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.” To know flowers in any real sense is to understand something of our place in the cosmos.

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Note: If you are a publisher and would be interested in bringing this series out in full color, let us know. We’re planning to do something through Lulu, but will entertain other offers.

Panax trifolius

Because the root is round
& no bigger than a nut
it is not worth its weight in gold,
though still prized as medicine.
Had it limbs like a man
we might sing out its name—
little brother ‘sang! Instead,
we step over its perfect clouds,
oblivious to the mystery
of its androdioeciousness,
why some umbels should be all male
& others hermaphroditic,
how that little knot of a root
unties itself from year to year:
the flower fading to pink
shrinks & shrivels with the rest
of the above-ground parts, & when
it re-sprouts the following spring,
it’s no longer the same sex—
how it got that way
& why it persists, dwarf,
mountain-dweller,
unmaker of aches.

Trientalis borealis

Seven stamens twist
like one-legged strangers
at a station, anxious to avoid
each other’s gaze.

The train hasn’t come,
might never come.
The snow gives off a radiance
like a face at the bottom of a well.

The platform shakes
on its slender stalk. We are
in this together, & the stars
are closer than we think.

Arisaema triphyllum

This is no pulpit but a pit,
almost a gullet, clogged
with corpses of those that wouldn’t fit
through the exit at the base of the spathe.
It generates its own heat
& a faint scent said to resemble rot
or stagnant water,
attracting fungus gnats
to the minute flowers on the spadix,
which might be male this year
& female or unisex the next.
What church could stomach
such license in the pulpit?
But then we learn how the raw
corm burns, blistering the throat,
its raphide needles causing
agonies in the gut. Only drying
or a slow roast can tame its heat.
This is pepper turnip,
dragon root, devil’s ear.
This is Jack & the candlestick together,
fire & brimstone & the unclean lip.

Viola pubescens

Long after the yellow funfair tent
with its sudden shower of pollen
& its sweet prize has been packed away,
after the bees have gone
in search of other diversions
& the forest has grown dark & thick,
the violet hosts a quieter, stranger sideshow:
the cleistogamous flower, a tent
that never opens & admits nobody.
Like a Wall Street investment firm
writing I.O.U.s to itself, it has
all the magic it needs
within its green inviolate room.
We may infer the success of its transactions
only from its conversion
into a new instrument,
with contents set for future release—
a hedge against all the vagaries
of spring & commerce.

Hepatica nobilis

Above the road bank where
the hepatica has just come
into bloom, carrion beetles
clamber through the quills
of a dead porcupine.
Spring azure butterflies ring
what’s left of its mouth—
a void spanned by a pair
of yellow rails—
& ignore the blossoms
swaying on their downy stems
in all the colors of the sky,
white & pink & blue.
The snow hasn’t been gone a week,
but already life & death
seem far apart. The rusty leaves
that lasted the winter out
are relaxing into the earth,
& soon will be indecipherable
even to the most ardent follower
of the doctrine of signatures
in search of liverleaf,
or those who seek respite
from dreams of snakes.

*

An earlier version of this poem appeared in a post from April 17, 2006.