Yellowwood & Yew

…and taking his father’s hand
he tried to lift it from Ephraim’s head…

Yellow woods array in patterns that repeat,
Entangling brittle-branched zigzags of limbs
Lost in familiar double-crosses, split
Like lineages. At issue, the names
Of cladrasis: the older lutea
Withdrawn as merely colored circumstance,
While golden heartwood finds kentuckea
Observe a land of stated permanence.

Old Jacob rested life, thus, his wrestling hands
Declaring Ephraim before Manassas –
Selecting Joseph’s second-born son as
Yews choose to eulogize: each bough depends
Earthward, piercing graveyard flesh, wintered bones
Withdrawn as Yahweh’s own death-interred bones.

Xmas Rose (Christ Herbe)

Behold as you see, both you and your lands
belong to the Pharao. Take seed and sow the fields.

X-mas rose infiltrates Lenten gardens,
Making Christmas unwind Easter’s rebirth
And torture expectations with silence –
Such are the seasons still beneath the earth.

Rising late, you’re early enough to last
Our winter’s cracked and cankered calendar.
Slowly your striking petals break the fast
Eternity’s observed in time’s empire.

X too marks the garden spot where sorrow bore
Her benefice. Time’s famine brought her low
Evoking flowers from tears. A tiny hand
Reached for, drawing up the black hellebore,
Beholding gifts received with debts to owe,
Enriching Joseph’s seed with promised land.

Xmas Berry Trees

God sent me before you into Egypt
for your preservation…

X-mas berry trees take the world by storms,
Moving through mango groves and everglade,
Ahead of hurricane’s surging tide –
Successfully florid in invasive terms.

But before this Hollywood berry came,
Emaciated winter, withering thin,
Remembered its December with famine,
Recusing claims to true a new land’s name.

Youth’s fountain ages with each season’s promise.
Thus Ponce De Leon’s Pascua Florida
Renews its tropic tropes with yuletide flora.

Each storm warning blows with signs of Christmas
Endowing violence with nativity –
So Joseph’s virtues weathered sovereignty.

White Horehound

I thy servant will stay instead of the boy
in the service of my lord...

White horehound bodes a bitter exodus.
Horizon-bound and slave to winter’s ease,
It sees itself the hair shirt of Horus,
Tickling scythe’s demand for easy excuse….

Easy, too, Pharaoh steadies hand and heart,
Hovering over herbs’ biting leaves to hold
Osiris purged in vase and set apart,
Reversing a Jew bought with a Jew sold.

Egypt embedded horehound with importance –
Half the time in hope; in faith to make a guess
Otherwise. So blood takes its fill of sins,
Urging dawn to bloom the day with darkness.

Now bitter as an herb, poor Juda says,
“Death’s my brother the day another dies.”

Wisteria & Walnut Tree

“Is this your young brother,
of whom you told me?”

Wisteria, the first and last, always
Invades the trellis, pergola and wall –
Succoring selfish suckers with clustered sprays
That, dripping fragrance, fatally strangle
Envied forests of their eastern light: Zi ten
Remands its vanity; each vein-blue vine
Intertwining weathers, bruised blue with rain,
A German tongue-storm that lashes blaue regan.

Walnut trees thus bear up the nuts of Zeus
And hang down in lusty strains of godhead…
Love speaks all languages nevertheless,
Neglecting neither native tongue nor blood,
Underwriting Joseph as the alien
To transcribe Israel’s love for Benjamin.

Violet and Veronica

And the third day he brought them out of prison
and said, Do as I have said
and you shall live, for I fear God.

Violet, Father Zeus had splayed your purple
In Io’s sorrow, violating her way,
Obliging her to eat your life. Each footfall,
Left you cowed with bruised inconstancy,
Eliciting your obedient grief
To flee a passing god’s momentous might.
Veronica, though, hard pain’s high relief,
Expressed with easy petals a complete
Redress of sorrow’s portrait, facing God –
Obedience, her sunlight’s own reward,
Now again is bearing victory’s return.
In a similar passage, Joseph stored
Corn and kine, restoring Egypt’s common good,
And freed his brothers from their hungry scorn.

Viburnum and Viscum

And he turned his name,
and called him in the Eyptian tongue,
The saviour of the world.

Viburnum takes its own wayfaring way
In earnest, honest in fen, field or farm,
Burgeoning arrow-true or queered to stray
Unencumbered by season, soil or worm.
Regaled as moments turn with burning suns –
Now hot and high in June, now low and cold
Until November’s trimmed orbit – at once
Met everywhere and everywhere exiled.

Viscum, another such broadcast outcast,
Interprets seasons – intertwines them with myth:
Sticking to sleep’s twiggy limbs, mistletoe’s curled
Confusions kiss around the cursed and blessed
Until Joseph cursed his journey, blessed his wealth,
Met a pharaoh, and dreamed to save the world.