Orchid & Onychium

Immediately the other coming forth,
held his brother’s foot in his hand…

Orchids hold humanity in rapt regard,
Repaying woman’s steady fondling gaze,
Collecting on man’s madness for beauty, starred
High in botany’s soiled paradise.
Informing roots, the living principle hangs
Down, the same that for eons delivered
Onychium - with fern’s primeval wings
Nesting prehistoric forests’ green-feathered
Yields. Like Isaac, this simple scion breeds
Complexity in opposition. From
Heir to son, crooked stem forever flowers
In air and sun that know no fall, seeds
Under earth until the spores of death’s powers
Make decay the fertile ground for kingdom come.

Oso Berry & Ostrya

He that came forth first was red,
And hairy like a skin…

Oso berry, bitter tasting but good food-
Stuff for bearing winter’s summary of dreams.
Offered first fruits of spring, by June imbued
Blue and ripe with meat. These Indian plums
Elevate spring’s time to place. Their almond scent
Reveals a sweet lure – a cyanide trace
Redolent as the effort to supplant
Yahweh’s sweetest word with dumb bitterness.

Ostrya, your iron wood serves to suit
Steel’s sharpened ax blade, its handle hewn to hew
Trunk of your trunk – such is wood’s irony.
Rebekah’s silent spring thus summered plenty;
Yahweh gave Isaac Jacob plucking Esau -
A bitter blessing bearing doubled fruit!

New Zealand Flax

And they digged in the torrent
and found living water.

New Zealand flax embodies the text for
Evening’s glow: like a match head’s spaded flame
Woven into dark, it spreads its texture,
Zealous to burn, beyond the stars. The same
Entreats the swingle’s blade, heckling whole cloth
A gathered netting of exotic clades.
Loosely to equivocate such tangled kith
And kin, there the linen’s weave still abides.

Naturally sourced, Isaac’s vested claims will last,
Drawn tight as names of wells that spill salvation
Forming his challenge and opposition –
Like flaxen fibers after being doused
And ret for choicest fabrics, fought for among
Xenophobic tribes, and knit seamlessly strong.

Neolitsea (White Bolly Gum Tree) & Nyssa (Black Gum Tree)

“My immortal life is on the point of beginning.”
– last words of St. Andrew Kim Taegon (1821-1846) patron saint of Korea,
martyr and first native born Roman Catholic priest in Korea.
He was tortured and beheaded near Seoul on the Han River.




And he digged again other wells
which the servants of his father Abraham had digged…

Neolitsea, the Hermit Kingdom's
Evangelist, your trinitarian
Overtures are Godhead’s triumph: each leaf’s vein
Leaving wholly holy white bolly gums.

Insular peninsula, Korea
Tortures itself with the blood of martyrs:
Seven years within its silent borders –
Every bit a sign as neolitsea -

Andrew Kim and friends found there world without end.
Nyssa, too, roots destiny to origins;
Yellow and negligible, its bloom begins
Small, but with room to let its limbs expand –

So Isaac resurrected Abram's wadi
And there grew the names on God’s family tree.

...Abimelech himself said to Isaac:
Depart from us, for thou art become
Much mightier than we.

Marsh pennywort will pay out dividends
As it multiplies interest, its coin-
Rounded leaves dangle thin purse-strings for fronds,
Spreading the inflation of its foreign green,
Hard currency in wetland’s liquid time,
Precious specie preponderating pond
Economies in an aggressive scheme
Necessarily blessed because so fecund.

Now, Abimelech paid out the price of pride
Yammering on about Isaac’s teeming hoard.
What worried him was how fluid the coins
Of the realm devalued in this Hebrew brood.
Renowned as bad pennies, they seemed prepared
To issue greener species from Isaac’s loins.

Magnolia & Myrtle

And the servant told Isaac all that he had done.
Who brought her into the tent of Sara his mother;
and took her to wife. And he loved her so much,
that it moderated the sorrow which was occasioned by his mother’s death.

- for Lindsay Godsbody

"Magnolia, ur-flower, were you there
Around the greening time of God’s own thumb,
Growing between good and evil, and life or
Nihil, prolocutor to each of them,
Or did your gaudy bloom’s magnificence,
Left-over emblem of Adam’s excess,
Intend to play at sin’s defective instance?"
Asked the good that life was bearing witness...

Myrtle, meanwhile, bears its burden of love’s
“Yes” in life’s tangled weave with such fragrant
Rogations that nature plays the servant
To God and man alike. To each it gives
Living proof that love can grow abundant –
Easing grief in blessed Rebekah’s alcoves.

Lenten Rose and Lily

And [Rebecca] said to the servant:
Who is that man cometh towards us along the field?
And he said to her: That is my master.
But she quickly took her cloak and covered herself.

Lenten rose, your blooms are a tree of wounds,
Ever to green spring’s badge of splendor.
No thorns demanding blood, you take to hands
Too easily, unabashed by candor,
Entreating summer sunlight to embark
Now over soil’s unbuttoned furrows
Replete with shadows - now to raise the work
Of bread and days. A fielded figure narrows
Sight, his hard eyes curse the sweat of sun and dust.
Evening soothes what noon’s blistered hours bleach
Lily-white. Caravans of cool winds crest
Isaac’s soul as love’s slower hooves approach
Like anticipation’s growing susurrus –
Yielding God in lily-veiled hosannas.

Leucothoe and Larch

ille ferox inmansuetusque precantem
tendentemque manus ad lumina Solis.... - Ovid, Metamorphoses IV.237-238

An exceedingly comely maid, and a most beautiful virgin,
and not known to man: and she went down to spring
and filled her pitcher and was coming back. - Gen. 24:16

Leucothoe, your sunny death is life
Espoused beneath a fragrant, lyric sky.
Ubiquitous yet bashful as your grief,
Clustered like tears, your blossoms modestly
Open, little by little drawing life,
Taken from heaven’s rain-swollen sky.
Happiness stems from the same green as grief,
Obliging doghobble to modesty
Even as it carpets summer with mountain
Larch – ruling forests with Homeric simile.
A promise green or dry, the larch archly
Recalls the servant come back to Haran
Chasing down a virgin whose water jars
Hold an eternity of sand and stars.

King Cup and Knautia

I am a stranger and a sojourner among you;
give me the right of a buryingplace with you,
that I may bury my wife.

Kingcup quaffs its draughts of sun and rain
In cordial measures. Left flush, it fulfills,
Nodding off until time became Britain,
Gilding swamp and marsh with burgeoning grails.
Caltha palustris enthrones April’s weeds
Until - as Isaac usurped Ishmael’s.
Pregnant deeds - it lops and drops its deadheads.

Knautia, your crimson makes memorial
Nothing so lush as marigold’s marsh. Your grave
Abounds in arid soil with roots that run
Under dusty feet – even as Sarah
Tracked her rest among the Hittites, in foreign
Interment – awaiting faith to come alive
Again, reborn among a foreign flora.

September: "Angeload"

September blow soft till the fruit’s in the loft. -16th Century Proverb

Angeload, this poem is about you, but is not for you

Because the blush is on the apple, sugar’s rush to cover
Itself with the belabored wane of summer’s fullness;
And fox broom and goldenrod have come to no good
By savaged month’s end as forests blush deeply
At what summer has done to itself in the end:
Trees fill their spatula shapes with sapphires
And colors of the flame - smoky pumpkin and fazed lemon.

But as steadfast as fir and spruce expose their spines,
Green wood’s last opposition unravels to the first of autumn,
It is a wandering time for all who can walk or think...
And fox-terrier and corgi terrorize the warrens, coming back
From Canuck Hill with fur matted in dew and blood while leaves
Hang in snags beneath the belly’s hem, an elegantly stained slip
Shred in some Dianic drama, backlit by moonlight.

The morning air in our room is super-cooled by last night --
A storm front's exorcism -- flushing us from warm beds
To dog-walks among orchard’s golden tents, last asylum
From time’s windy stead. And for instinctual reasons,
The inquisitive whiskers, the assured, anthracitic nose,
The bifurcated eyes, the mane of foxy merriment --
All these assumed the equinox without comment.

Lady, look, light catches your two shades in plain wicker. . .
And see, Jasper, your dog survived the shot-guns and damp duck-
Blinds, never really much of a huntress in the first place. . .
But one eye goes dark like late leaves, the other blue again
This year, for a cold day of atonement to come: high skies
Of cancerous cloud fever the laden land with bronchial rattle
Changing over summer’s someday to autumn’s from now on –

Yet without Angeload, for whom this poem is, but not about.