Rehderodendron

Send me away
that I may return into my country,
and to my land.

Rehderodendron, ball-pointed, petalled,
Embroiders nature’s simple page of white –
Hack-turned-nom-de-bloom Alfred Rehder scrawled
Deep for words to dig for weeds and wrote,
Empty-paged and ear to earth, all he heard
Resounding pen with spade. He found the land
Of taxonomy fertile, by weed and word
Discovering names in each Edenic find.
Even now, he survives silence’s seasoned
Nomenclature. Home was his arboretum,
Defining deliverance, and his God
Rooted nature just as Rachel had
Obtained for Joseph a holy freedom
Neither father nor pharaoh could withstand.

November: "Other Voices"

A tedious season they await
Who hear November at the gate.
-Alexander Pushkin

All saintly, grown half-way from learned girlhood
To full wilt of soul which womanhood achieves,
You jacket life in shocked piping, sullen mood.

One hand’s at time’s doorknob; the other believes
Entrancing exits of a drafty year
Elect what remnants your future receives.

But making progress nor egress, you fear
November is your last chance to induce
The autumn to harvest a fallen tear.

Because you have little time to bemuse
Your heart to handle what has gone before,
You can’t claim grief’s nor candor’s old excuse –

Yet, as the story goes, love was your bete-noir
Foretold as bad weather; and love, the friend
You did not want but could not avoid, the war

Both cold and soft, undeclared yet convened;
A beautiful waking to dawn’s topaz light
But dark betrayal too – the only godsend

You’d had. This month, dressed black to the nines, you might
Make a breakthrough – moving from grey distances
To open spaces where autumn’s geese take flight

In songs of thanksgiving. Other entrances
Replace their exit, other voices fill
Your head. Meanwhile your mourning enhances

That day the phone choked your heart: “We found him... still…
Half his head gone...His hunting rifle close
Beside him...Eyes more certain than futile... “

His love had grown strong; and now his seed tries
To grow as strong within your grief as blood,
To groan from month to month with smothered cries.

Queen Anne's Lace

The Lord saw my affliction,

Now my husband will love me.

Queen Anne’s Lace shrivels up like a bird’s nest
Under summer’s final drum beat: the spring
Equinox has cast its long-stemmed shadows west.
Evening stirs a cold fingered breeze, touching
Night’s rooted constellations of wild carrot
Adrift in hilltop fields, an adroitly sewn
Nebula of patterned blooms to bear what
Nebulous myths would ring a bleeding queen’s crown,
Eavesdropping Ariadne’s web-stitched finesse –
So pain’s preventive, knit by God within
Leah’s womb, was Israel’s first limb, named Rueben,
Announcing Yahweh’s landscape of largesse,
Christened sterile sin’s quickened antidote:
Elected lead thread of Joseph’s parti-coat.

Quercus & Quince

But Lia was blear-eyed;
Rachel was well favored,
And of a beautiful countenance.

Quercus endures. This singular sentence
Understates oak’s hard beauty, its late bounty
Embedding lofty reach in eminence.
Rachel, too, would reach late and offer plenty
Ceded so to Jacob but held off by
Uncle Laban’s wether-proofed endurances –
Striking deep in Jacob’s grain – a taste of why
Quinces first soured the tongues of Eden's princes:
Undulate branches worked in ugly gnarls
Intimate cankered Adam’s rotten shame,
Nurturing Rachel’s sweetness from Lia’s blear
Conceptions: God came upon each daughter
Enlarging twelve-fold a picked orchard’s fame –
Sustaining it, root to fruit, all Israel’s.

Pansy, Paris Herb & Pink

And he saw in his sleep a ladder standing upon the earth
and the top thereof touching heaven;

the angels also of God ascending and descending by it…

Pansy, everywhere your sprout is recalled,
A promised thought renewed in remembrance,
Nodding your head at dawn and dusk, you build
Stems up for an Olympian entrance;
You yawn your face at sun and moon, the same
Paris basks its herb-proffered whorls in, twinned leaves
Arching rung by rung up the air. Its stem
Rise above Himalayan slopes, it saves
Itself, high and rare, in God’s divine air
Soaking the sun’s rise and set with the very
Pink and meat of dreams. So Pinks too cut their
Incarnate teeth on day’s divinity,
Numbered among an avalanche of envoys’
Καιρός! – ΧΡ! in endless alleluias.

Plumbago & Pawpaw

It was the will of God
that what I sought
came quickly in my way.

Plumbago, what eye has not seen your bloom
Laze along a hill, lighter than the lead
Unearthed in ancient pipe that sluiced your name,
Misleading as Jacob kidding with kid’s hide?
Blind old Isaac believed the things that seem
And died of heartbreak the moment his shade
Grew beyond illusion’s moment in time –
Oblique as leadwort blueing a hillside.

Pawpaw echoes the same native neglect
As named, it can trick out true papaya
With syllabics like a mess of derelict
Pottage such as cleverly bought Esau
At cost to eat a la carte his birthright -
Won by Jacob with Isaac’s appetite.

October: “Pumpkinhead”

What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?
- Doris Lessing

“No, my brothers, my sisters, some kiss to kill a pumpkin’s
Full moons or boyishly kick them to shattered shards -
Some young things which take crepe and cardboard for skins
To make out pirate hats, robot heads and leopards,
Hold ghostly linen poses and suppose one’s dead kin’s
Plot thickens them in their white-picketed grave yards. . . “
¤
It is October in October country, where
A preachy preacher preaches
With black fashions and a darkly held air
On why God fell for his creatures
And why the Fall is all too cold and rare
For Jack-O’s lantern-jawed features
Too long fermenting in his own sugar.

Here are time’s border lands, where perhaps a pheasant
Will stick its garrishly-ringed neck
From beyond the woods, bejeweled crescent
In quick, flightless, tremulous trek
Through the hunter-harried air, chill, pleasant,
Demanding an awful respect
For mercury’s merciful fall and dissent.

But forget it, Pastor Pumpkinhead. Make the Fall
As darkly, grotesquely comic
As you want, the door in the garden wall
Rusts fast with frost and still will stick
On the hinges of justice – so we all
Retain enough skull flesh to prick
Even consciences rendered skeletal.
¤
“. . .And so, daylight saves its ends like straw fired in paraffin
Replacing a clergy’s empty head inside a pumpkin
For the hollowed-out evenings before every Halloween
To ignite the night with a jagged, opal-fired grin. “