Post by job on Sept 30, 2008 9:36:53 GMT -5
While everyone is recovering from the Crash of 08, I'm sending along a sonnet cyle I'd done a while ago, interested in input.
There are several things going on at once - the sonnets (which are also acrostics) are paired - a tree or other plant with a flower. They're also serve as a sort of commentary on the various stories in Genesis . I like to think this is what Carlos Linneaus would have been doing in his spare time...
Enjoy,
JOB
Garden Anthology
“He brought them to the man to see what he would call them…”
Prologue
Carolus Linneaus was the king of names,
Another Adam giving his assent
Reality in the organized aims
Of science. Studiously, his mind would plant
Lineages with grafted stems of Latin,
Unearthing meaning found in roots of Greek.
Still, signal fragments of that first garden
(Lost in less time than the holy week
In time’s own making) leave us haunted signs:
Nomenclature’s power to plant a tree
And reason’s wisdom to adore the bloom –
Enduring death, though, life leaves enough room
Upon nature’s page and love’s mystery
Seeds its genesis with word- furrowed lines.
I.i.
Arctostaphylos cleaves the hardest tongues,
Riving body’s sound from spirit’s sense.
Call it manzanita, though, and it hangs
There honeyed with art’s apple-tang recompense.
Obtuse as Adam was, could he not see,
Steward and butler of God’s catalog,
That his one task was to match and marry
Art and science in living analog?
Put that way, each laden limb holds the cause
Like that first apple’s bittersweet bite.
Yes, death shined up our parents’ paradise
Leaving time to bear the shriveled berries.
In time, too, Adam and Eve sought a climate
Suited to the words they were meant to eat.
ii.
Amarylis sparkled for a moment,
Mentioned by Virgil, full of blackened ire.
Adam felt your heat, first and last tenant
Residing where pagan poets would retire
Yet could not. Cameos aside, your bloom
Loses itself to perennial autumn
Like Eve who prided her self-prinked plume
In sin’s hothouse, sweating deadly perfume.
Divided, conquered parents scattered seed
Along the mincing route that fled from shame –
Consider how the curse they worked to breed
Eventually bore the same for need
And holy want can break the earth like bread,
Eating the light that takes the family name.
II.i.
Black sassafras breaks new ground between stones
Like Adam cultivating his family tree
Around the world. Through stone, the taproot groans,
Clings to craggy outcrops, overhangs the sea,
Knuckles down against a fallen landscape
Somehow greening its wood from trunk to limb:
A hymn to the dead intones a leaf’s dry scrape
Sounding bones and husks in nature’s anthem.
Standing to relieve the hard-lined horizon
A shrub’s scent scrubs the air. Like an antidote
For wilted history, it finds a purchase
Retailed in rock, blossoming with increase.
A hymn to the quick, wind clears a canyon’s throat
Sounding wings on water, grace’s antiphon.
ii.
Black hellebore on the garden border
Limns the dawn, the first since Eve took offense
At God and stormed out on his green order.
Cross-eyed Adam straddles the garden fence,
Knowing fauna would never draw so near
His nature once the snakes had had their way.
Eve didn’t mind until fanged; the hell she bore
Left her confused and unable to say.
Laboring for bread, birth, breath, all the pain
Endemic to flesh, a madness without cure
Beyond the poison that works its medicine
On Adam called by name by his creator,
Roaming winter’s outlands for spring’s first sign,
Expecting to taste grace in the hellebore.
III.i.
Cercis betrays itself in its crimson
Every spring; this, the Judas tree, with dry pod
Rattling a count of coins and bones. First son
Committed blood to his vegetable greed
Inventing cities with blood sacrifice
Shining like silver in a beggar’s field.
Clematis creeps across its wicker trellis –
Like serial envy’s cereal yield
Entering the heart along a willful path.
Mastered by a thought, God was forsaken
And man murdered – twin sins requiring
The purest flesh to slake the thirst of wrath,
Inventing the pilgrim’s road now taken
Setting off its sojourn from earthly wandering.
ii.
Castor oil plants are universal
As sin. In 1978,
Social enemy Georgi Markov fell
To an umbrella’s tip in a London street,
Object of brotherly hate once more rehearsed,
Resurrecting Abel’s cry from the earth.
One brother is blessed; another is cursed
In this act, man roots himself to homicide –
Losing heaven’s harvest, he gains the world’s dirt.
Plenty of nothing stains his working hands
Like the cavity left by a crushed heart.
Again and again, man’s lost nature finds
Nowhere on earth a place to rest or hide
Abel’s blood – the contract’s ink that never dried.
IV.i.
Daphne, shaded daughter, whom Greek fates ordain,
Apollo’s rueful touch would catch up to you,
Planting you in envy’s divine disdain.
How is it that evil blossoms into
New beauty, green goodness, tragic truth
Emerging the same from impure soil
Dove trees were given wing in, the same earth
On which Cain’s restless destiny would toil?
Virtue’s vessel, the first ark, was Abel’s gift
Extended to God, first born and best kind
Taken from his herds in savage oblations.
Required, though, was the real thing. God would shrift
Eve’s first born in first blood of her second
Even as a third would grandfather nations.
ii.
Dog-tooth violet, your fanged petals deceive
Our eyes. You are no mourning flower – your life
Growls at raining sunlight. So we believe
That you strain your faithful bloom to face the grief
Of shades. Your adder’s tongue makes its whispers
Of air, and we begin to hate the doubt
That cultivates the void within our prayers.
How full is flesh that cannot do without
Violence.
Thus, did Cain suffer to perform
In envy of his brother’s better love.
Our history is sacrifice in the grain
Like Cain’s, a good that wilts in the vein,
Empty as an echo, the final proof
That God alone matters in man’s hollow form.
V.i.
Eleutherococcus, you too belong
Living in this garden, harboring Greek cadence
Enthralling sunlight in your shade, a song
Undoing tired winter. What radiance
Though, hides beneath your shadow-arching limbs?
Here, world in seed, a berry, grain’s pithy husk
Everything goes to ground or, starving, trims
Relevance and takes the sinful soul to task:
Once, a man named Noah knew freedom was
Contingent on the ark-built indwelling
Of every soul. Once men became their own
Coffers, their own fruit bore and ground them down,
Concluding their own radiance swelling
In cataracts of grief that wept the skies.
ii.
European figwort, like God’s heart crushed
Under a mad world’s pressure, you’re the stop-gap
Rupturing through earth as all creation dashed
Over the precipice. Why can we not stop
Pretending our moral voice is a ghost
Elevated to myth abstracted from flesh?
And so we have no means but they tend to dust,
No ends to soothe our hearts, so sore and rash.
Floods, Noah had seen, but this deluge was
Irrigating hell itself. With furrowed brow
God’s wrath cut wide across creation’s face,
Worried with expressions of divine disgust.
Receding rage spread a grinning rainbow,
Translating, like a prism, a word’s promise
VI.i.
Fallopia, named for anatomy
After the fact – the bridge between potent
Life and actual soul – your proclivity
Lends itself to haphazard wall and fence
Of spring, creeping roots on surface and post,
Picking your way across winter’s cold war.
In battle after battle, March has lost
All power under your fire’s quick cover.
Figured in Noah’s naked hands, heaven breached
In prayer’s pigeon beak. Faithless, the raven ran
Glistening black between the sea’s expanse and
First firs poking at the sky. The black wing found
Irrevocable wandering; but man
Rooted his rudderless vessel where it beached.
VI.ii.
“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter,
day and night, shall not cease.”
-Gen. 8:22
French marigold, corona of the day,
Recall the spring’s word that went unwritten
Emerging as winter scribbled away
Notes of melting ice. Your punctuation
Checks winter’s lugubrious paragraph.
How then do you mark the transitory phrase
Making March idle in its Ides and laugh
Aloud before the thaw of your sunrise?
Remember Noah’s first spring, too, the one
Insured by God that every season would
Get a hearing and be numbered in turn;
Obliged to time, He counted suns to burn
Leaves to turn, turning seeds and burning wood;
Dismantling night with day’s golden crown.
VII. i.
Glenditsia, your trinity of thorns
Lean out from trunk and low branch a brandished
Engagement with wilderness. Each cluster warns
Deer and hare away. What if the world wished
It could find your shade without penalty,
Touch your textured bark, taste your honeyed pod,
Subsist as Christ’s cousin on your honey
Imbued locust, painlessly knowing God?
Ararat’s rocky slopes, though, ceded
Grape vines in warp and weft’s old testament
Restoring balance with a vintage joy.
Arbors thriving on thirsty sediment
Provided Noah his first drunk to specify
Exquisitely what the taste of blood needed.
ii.
Golden rod grows by early spring’s roadsides
Ored like an idol from mountainous shade.
Like a tower of language, it fades
Denying all but what its own colors made.
Enchanted eyes will wander far afield,
Numbering starlight as a first attribute,
Redundant as sand’s grain to count the yield
Of April’s garden after March falls mute.
Dead set to turn their minds into heaven, men
Gage a slap to God’s face with false unity.
And dashing men like ants from their proud mound
God grants their tongues a general confusion
Except the yellow star of Bethlehem
Announces spring with lily’s nativity.
VIII. i.
Hazel branch of God’s chosen, splits and bends
At the fork with folksy water-wisdom
Zigzagging, not lost, but loose in the hands,
Engaged in divining its own baptism
Lost beneath the sands that first parched Adam.
Holly breaks soil above deserted lands
Offering its green and red to Jerusalem
Like an emblem: what life wants, God demands.
Yahweh spies such vernal blood in Abram:
Heathen hands await the plow and hoe, the seed’s
Event recalls the steps of this faith from
A place called Ur, the fatherland of gods,
To fields of ripening Canaan where he plants
Hands like roots and veins like vines’ descendants.
ii.
Hyacinthos, another slain godson,
Your purple bruise became your blush and hue.
Ai! Ai! wept the lyric God-sun
Crying his golden light down upon you.
Image of grief, divine yet human,
Nearly touching in its beauty the true
Test of trust, suggesting what faith’s own stamen
Has produced: in blood shed the flower grew.
Hyssop, gather up this blood in your bouquet,
Your bunch of green, your clustered, thirsty green,
So that the father’s son is spared the stain
Suffuse in tinder’s tendered holocaust.
Offended nature stays the hand of noonday
Perspiring aspersions its own would cast.
IX.i.
Illicium, called what you are called,
Let your leaves believe their own sweet perfume,
Let your spice bite with licorice distilled
Into essence that takes another name –
Called what you are called until harvest calls
Irrevocably for anise, pod-entombed;
Until God’s tongue germinates more syllables
Made mouth to mouth, by heart to heart exhumed.
Idesia, you too have multiples
Determining your eastern silhouette.
Each April forms your leaves like hearts anew.
So Abram’s old faith would exfoliate
And winter out his laden panicles
In time to father berries from his bough.
ii.
Iris in flower, iris in the eye,
Resplendent faith survives the famished space
In between: May’s message of earth and sky
Sends word, and each standard falls in place.
Ixia, though, awaits its fulfillment,
Xiphoid leaves and petals inching toward war
In winter’s barren battlegrounds, its moment
Agreed to, kept buried with sword and spear.
Isatis, dyed-in-the-wool dyer’s woad,
Secures indelible seeds with shooting pistils
As Abraham endured his hungry exile
Taking Sarah as sister, Hagar as bride.
Ishmael’s bloodline stained the fabric of gentiles
So Egyptian linen was tinged by God’s will.
X.i.
Jamesia, named for Edwin P. James,
Adumbrates his find beneath its paltry shade.
Memoir writ small, the cloistered cliffbush names
Edwin to its own freedom’s species instead.
Scrabbling on the Rockies for a small hold
In history’s granite fissures, botanist
And plant are tied to one another’s field,
Enjoined as priest and victim, crime and feast.
Priests of mere knowledge, though, produce no art:
Jerusalem built faith on bread and wine;
Athens’ altars, though, thought to make man divine.
Manumitting abolition in his heart
Edwin found in life after 1820
Some of Melkizedek’s mysterious plenty.
X.ii
Jack in the Pulpit’s silent sermon style
Asseverates that forest lore remain concealed
Chasing ghosts that mean to reckon the tale
Kith and kin of root and colm would kiss when told
Names like Iriquois Breadroot and Indian
Turnip, Devil’s Ear and Memory Root;
Hidden truth’s strange covenant with fiction
Enclosed Jack in a taciturn pulpit.
Pitching a tent at blooming dead of noon
Under turpentine shadows, Abraham
Looks for homilies in the parched shimmer
Pulsing the parabolic horizon.
Imagination failed, but good news came
To him anyway at shadeless Mamre.
XI.i
Kennedia, your ugly unthinking head
Emerges in echoes of faithless Sodom
Negotiating bean with political bloom
Navigated by your rhetorical red.
Easy climber, you betray spring’s catholic dead
Deferring sunlit birthright for some damn
Ignobility that gains the cost of shame
As puritan frost will kill your Irish sod.
Kerria, a second generation spoiled,
Emerges, smoldering, like Easter’s rose.
Relative to you, early summer haze
Recalls Gomorrah, its spring defiled
In turning nature against her creed
And lusting to overpower even God.
ii.
Kingcup quaffs its draught of sun and rain
In cordial measures, left flush with your fill
Nodding off until time became Britain,
Gilding swamp and marsh with burgeoning grail.
Caltha palus, May is dying, its weeds
Undone, leaving you looking for burial,
Put to your deed and dropping your dead heads.
Knautia’s crimson makes memorial
Nothing so lush, for its own plotted grave
Abounds in arid soil, and its roots run
Under dusty feet – even as Sarah
Took her rest among the Hittites, in foreign
Interment – as if faith would come alive
Again, reborn among alien flora.
XII.i.
Leucothoe, your sunny death was life
Evolving under a mad lyric sky.
Ubiquitous yet bashful in 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
Obliges 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 eternity between sand and stars.
ii.
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 in your bloom’s candor,
Entreating summer sunlight to embark
Now over soil’s unbuttoned furrows
Replete with shadows as they raise the work
Of bread and days. A fielded figure narrows
Sight, his hard eyes curse the sweat of sun and dust.
Evening’s sky soothes what noon’s blistered hours bleach
Lily-white. Caravans of cool winds crest
Isaac’s soul as love’s slow hooves make their approach
Like anticipation’s growing susurrus –
Yielding God’s lily veiled in hosannas.
XIII. i.
Magnolia, ur-flower, you were there
Around the greening time of God’s own thumb,
Growing between good and evil, and life or
Nothing, prolocutor for each of them.
Or does your gaudy bloom’s magnificence,
Left-over emblem of Adam’s excess,
Intend to play sin’s defective instance
Asking the good of life to bear it witness?
Myrtle, meanwhile, bears its burden of love’s
“Yes” in life’s tangled weave with such fragrant
Rogations that nature plays the faithful servant
To God and man alike and to each gives
Living proof that love can grow abundant –
Entwining blessings through Rebekah’s alcoves.
ii.
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 coin
Of the realm devalued in this Hebrew brood,
Rampant as bad pennies, that seemed prepared
To issue greener species from Isaac’s loin.
XIV.i.
Neolitsea, the Hermit Kingdom’s
Evangelist, with trinitarian
Overtures – Godhead triumphs in each leaf’s vein
Leaving Christ wholly in the white bolly gum.
Insular peninsula, Korea
Tortures itself with the blood of martyrs:
Seven years within its silent borders –
Evangelizing as neolitsea,
Andrew Kim and companions found their end.
Nyssa, though, finds its black gum origins;
Yellow and negligible, its bloom begins
Small, but with room to let its limbs expand –
So Isaac resurrected his father’s wadi
And from it grew the names on God’s family tree.
ii.
New Zealand flax embodies the text for
Evening’s glow: like a match head’s bladed flame
Woven into dark, it spreads its texture,
Zealous to burn, but not a star. The same
Error swingles and heckles in whole cloth
And nets the slender and exotic clades
Loosely equivocal tangle of kith
And kin – whether 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 retted for choice fabric, fought among
Xenophobic tribes, made seamlessly strong.
XV.i.
Oso berry, bitter to taste but good
Sustenance for winter’s summary dreams.
Offered first fruits of spring, by June imbued
Blue, the ripe meat of these Indian plums
Elevates their place as their almond scent
Reveals a sweet lure, the cyanide trace
Redolent as the effort to supplant
Yahweh’s sweet word with silent bitterness:
Ostrya, your iron wood serves to suit
Steel’s ax blade with its handle hewn to hew
Trunk of your trunk – such is wood’s irony.
Rebekah’s silent spring bore summer’s plenty;
Yahweh gave Isaac his firstborn, Esau,
Another blessing bearing bitter fruit.
ii.
Orchid, you hold mankind in rapt regard,
Repay woman’s steadily fondling gaze,
Collecting man’s madness for beauty, starred
High in botany’s soiled paradise.
In your roots, the living principle hangs
Down, the same that for eons delivered
Onychium – the fern’s primeval wings
Nest prehistory’s forest floor with green-feathered
Yields. Like Isaac, simple scion breeding
Complex offspring in opposition. From
Heir to son, though, the line flowers forever
In air and sun that know no fall, seeding
Under earth until death has no power,
Making prime the soil to plant Kingdom Come.
XVI.i.
Plumbago, what eye has not seen your bloom
Laze along a hill, lighter than the lead
Unearthed in the pipe of your ancient 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 the moment’s illusion of time
Oblique as leadwort plumbing a hillside.
Pawpaw echoes the same native neglect
As its name tricks out the true papaya
With syllabics in a mess of derelict
Pottage such as cleverly bought Esau
At cost, devouring a la carte his birthright,
Winning his blessing with Isaac’s appetite.
ii.
Pansy, everywhere you 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 herb basks its proffered whorls in, twinned leaves
Arching rung by rung up the air. Its stem
Rising on 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. Pinks also cut their
Incarnate teeth on day’s divinity,
Numbered among the scaling, sloping envoys
Kairos, kiaros, endlessly about heaven’s joys.
XVII. i.
Quercus endures. This singular sentence
Understates oak’s hard beauty, its late bounty
Embedding its lofty reach and eminence.
Rachel, too, would reach late to offer plenty
Ceded to Jacob but withheld in craft by
Uncle Laban who tested the endurance
Struck deep in his nephew’s grain, tasting why
Quinces first soured Adam’s tongue.
The quince
Undulates its branchwork in an ugly gnarl
Intimating cankered Eden’s rotten shame
Nurtured by Leah’s sweeter eye to bitter
Conclusions. But God was with each daughter
Enlarging by twelve the scope of their fame –
Stipulating roots and limbs of Israel.
ii.
Queen Anne’s Lace shrivels up like a bird’s nest
Under summer heat’s final drum beat: the spring
Equinox long since cast 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 ring a bleeding queen’s crown,
Eavesdropping Ariadne’s web-stitched finesse –
So did God knit pain’s preventive within
Leah’s womb, Israel’s first limb, named Rueben,
Announcing Yahweh’s landscape of largesse,
Christened as sterile sin’s antidote:
Elected the lead thread of Joseph’s coat.
XVIII.i.
Rehderodendron, by your petals’ tongues you
Embroider nature’s elaborate page of white –
Hack-turned-nom-de-bloom, Alfred Rehder knew,
Departing words, to dig for weeds and write
Empty spaces. Ear to earth, all he heard
Resounds in spade and pen. 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 in nature just as Rachel had
Obtained in Joseph a holy freedom
Neither father nor pharaoh could withstand.
ii.
Rush and reed would grow to make common cause
Under cover of sensibility
Shared out in the dry sounds that sing a breeze
Heaping harvests of sheer utility.
Reed and rush would part ways at cutting time,
Each to thatch, caulk, stretch, stitch, bind and report,
Each in its own way, in each its own name,
Discounting discord with waddled rapport.
Rue and rye, though, make a separate peace
Urgent as Jacob and Laban to seed
Evidence of enjoyment beyond use –
Rye and rue, bread of life and herb of grace,
Your bitter loaves heaped-up at Gilead
Engender a sweeter bread to suffice.
XIX.i.
Strawberry tree, your fruit’s a second draft
Traducing original sweetness. The rank
Response on tongue and tooth becomes the graft
Arbutus grasps to its sinewy trunk.
Wrestling weather’s bitter angels, standing fast
By water’s edge, its unbudging form storms
Eire’s shores but leaves shadeless the English coast,
Revising landscape into religious terms.
Ruddy as blood, outlasting autumn’s length,
Your yield, unyielding to even one taste,
Transubstantiates old sweetness into new strength
Relentless as hands that bite a brother’s heel,
Embracing lust and holding God fast and chaste –
Embodied thus, Jacob became Israel.
ii.
St. Dabeoc’s heath blankets ben and bog,
Thick and grey as a monk’s hood. Dawn’s faint blush
Daubs a new day, druid prayer stroking each crag
And stone crop with nature’s broadened brush.
By St. Dabeoc’s name, heath pitched mission tents
Everywhere to shade in the pagan tones
Of low and highlands, graced with crimson tint
Conveying Lough Berg’s altar, like blood from stones.
So Jacob’s spontaneous booths and altars
Hallowing the hollow ground around Salem
Eventually canvassed the land of Canaan
And his pilgrim steps painted – from Adam
To Abraham – gospel gloss and margin,
Hinting at the songs of his shrouded Psalter.
XX.i.
Trembling aspen woodlands crisp their whisper,
Rejoicing with leaves, each a tongue that wags
Epiphany. The delicate clatter,
Multiplying root to crown with bit flags,
Bestirs a sovereign stand against biting
Licks of frost and fire. Strengthened by travail
In their one and many, incorporating
Nature’s paradox by design, they prevail.
Growing in faith determined at Esau’s heel,
And in his new name asserted, Israel gained
Something of the trembling sound that aspens
Perpetuate – refined and redefined,
Embracing God and brother, born to heal
Nations from a million bursting catkins.
ii.
Tidy tips are California’s response
In usual variables, to the manic
Daisies’ uniform stare. Their colors sense
Yesterday and tomorrow’s dramatic
Touch to dream of now condensed and magnified
In summer’s evening, Autumn’s even more.
Prepared to fall, each flat-tongued tip is tied,
Strung up with dreams that winter will not bear.
Tulips, too, pursed their lips, tightly knotted
Until even envied by the wind – betrayed,
Like Joseph, by insanity’s demands
Into rootless netherlands. His wit supplied
Pharoah’s tomorrow by yesterday’s hands,
Starving vanity by folly’s windy trade.
XXI. i
Umbrella plants in somber autumn rooms
Mistake themselves for ancient furniture
But their presence only means to make secure
Reassurances that summer resumes
Endlessly in a terra cotta pot.
Leaves rise and fall, shadow-cycled life sustained,
Leavening daily our entrances – feigned
As our inevitable exits are not.
Pre-possessive creation makes its terms
Lie in dusty corners, sheltering our fear.
As we look at death – its cold room confirms
Nature is not a potted plant – no more
Than Thamar’s womb cultured Juda’s house,
Springing sons to breach with blood her father-spouse.
ii
Umbrella flower, shut within your throat,
Myriad hues await release. Once spring
Became a captive word, stripped of its coat,
Rendered mute by winter’s wasted making.
Eventually your umbels fell away
Like timbered standards. Still, you would maintain
Legions against a late October’s day
And hold your ground among the autumn slain.
For nature’s doctrine leaves its signature note
Like Adam’s apple choking off the tongue.
Of course, your yawning parasols can cure
Whatever starves the year: by spring your song,
Enduring lies that swallowed Putiphar,
Reveals the truth that stuck in Egypt’s throat.
XXII.i.
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 seasons turn by burning suns –
Now hot and high in June, now low and cold
Under 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 curled
Confusion’s kiss around the cursed and blessed
Until Joseph’s cursed journey blessed him with
More than a pharaoh’s dream to save the world.
ii
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, shows hard pain’s high relief,
Expressed with easy petals, to complete
Redress with sorrow’s portrait facing God –
Obedience in her is sunlight’s reward
Now again to bear up victory’s return.
In a similar passage, Joseph stored
Corn and kine, restored Egypt’s common good
And freed his brothers from their hungry scorn.
XXIII.i
Wisteria, at first, at last – always
Invading trellis, pergola, wall –
Succoring selfish suckers with clustered sprays
That, dripping fragrance, fatally strangle
Envied forests of light. Twirled up, Zi ten
Remands its vanity; like veins, each blue vine
Intertwines bruised weather, its blue rain
As foreign as tongues storming blaue regan.
Walnut trees thus bear up the nuts of Zeus
And hang down the lusty strain of godhead…
Love speaks a single language nevertheless,
Neglecting neither native tongue nor blood
Undeterred by grudge or lust, like Joseph’s brain
Transcribing Jacob’s love for Benjamin.
ii
White horehound foreshadows bitter exodus.
Horizon-bound – a slave to winter’s ease
It sees itself as hirsute as Horus
To give the scythe’s demand easy excuse.
Easy, too, Pharaoh steadied hand and heart,
Hovering above horehound’s biting leaves to hold
Osiris purged in vase and set apart,
Reversing brothers bought and brothers sold.
Egypt imbedded 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 darkness dies.
Now Juda, echoing horehound’s shadow, said
“Death’s my brother – life, another, died.”
XXIV.i
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.
Before the Christmas berry’s coming came,
Emaciated winter, withering thin,
Remembered its December with famine,
Recusing claims that true the land’s own 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
Enduring violence for nativity –
So Joseph’s innocence weathered sovereignty.
ii
X-mas rose, you infiltrate our gardens,
Making Christmas unwind Easter’s rebirth
And torture expectations with silence,
Stillness your sole companion beneath the earth.
Rising late, you’re early enough to last
Out winter’s cracked and cankered calendar.
Slowly you strike your petals – and break the fast
Eternity observed in time’s empire.
X marks the garden spot where sorrow bore
Her benefice. Time’s famine brought her low
Evoking flowers from tears. A tiny hand
Reached for and drew up the black hellebore,
Beholding gifts received with debts to owe
Endowing Joseph’s seed with promised land.
XXV.i
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 the land of stated permanence.
Old Jacob came to rest his wrestling hands’
Down on Ephraim before Manassas –
Seeds of time thus bred a son from man as
Yew tree bears the theme for which each bough bends
Earthward, piercing churchyard’s flesh with bone
Working up Yahweh’s plant of resurrection.
ii
Yams, unearthed, solid, hunked, hold nothing sweet,
Although blessed essentially as blood, a boiled
Medicinal that means to eat at root
Something of yarrow’s meaning made manifold:
Yarrow root, reproduce a white flower
And love loves me not, but withers and drops;
Reproduce another, it bleeds over –
Random as straws dropped in total collapse.
Oracular as itching, yarrow heals
Wounds – the way yams absorb earth’s properties –
Rubbing raw Trojan feet hot on the heels
Of fortune cooling the heels of Achilles.
Our heroes heads are everlasting crowns
Topping hills like chance fixed by providence.
XXVI.i
Zizyphus jujuba, your fruit is born
In infant innocence, nestled within
Zion’s crowning hills – tender flesh to thorn,
Yoking destiny to the branch of men.
Passions dulled by your fruit, the Lotus Men
Hibernate in dreams, eschewing your thorn
Undulating in a slow reign within
Souls that die to life and live to be born.
Jacob, too, named the land of death at last,
Ushering in the end of the beginning
Just as Adam brought Eden’s conclusion
Under the guise of fruit whose thorn would last
Beyond his children’s fathers, beginning
A generation without conclusion.
ii
Zingiber, you edge the east of history
In the cornucopia of your root,
Navigating empire, traversing spice route,
Gaining universal appeal – this story
Is a real horn of plenty: medieval
Belief would see the source of your descent
Exalted in Edenic exodus, sent,
Reprieved and rescued far east of evil.
Zinnia, you edge the west of mystery….
In the asterix of your desert bloom
New worlds of color set their suns in starry
Nativity. Cortez among las mariposas.
In God’s garden plot he saw Adam
And heard Joseph name the new genesis.
Epilogue
Carl von Linne would change his name in time
Arriving much as Abram did at Ab-
Raham, Lord of kingdoms, families, and phylum,
Leaving order and to each class a job:
Vindicating Adam’s utter Babel
Of general sinfulness with special grace.
Note Abram’s stamen and Sarah’s pistil:
Love is the word at root that left her trace
Incarnated in each renewed season.
Nativity thus digs for its own dying.
Note, too, these numbered names that sought to sing
Eternity – where man is resurrection
Just as woman is birth – both are naming
Creatures whom God has lent His Dominion.
There are several things going on at once - the sonnets (which are also acrostics) are paired - a tree or other plant with a flower. They're also serve as a sort of commentary on the various stories in Genesis . I like to think this is what Carlos Linneaus would have been doing in his spare time...
Enjoy,
JOB
Garden Anthology
“He brought them to the man to see what he would call them…”
Prologue
Carolus Linneaus was the king of names,
Another Adam giving his assent
Reality in the organized aims
Of science. Studiously, his mind would plant
Lineages with grafted stems of Latin,
Unearthing meaning found in roots of Greek.
Still, signal fragments of that first garden
(Lost in less time than the holy week
In time’s own making) leave us haunted signs:
Nomenclature’s power to plant a tree
And reason’s wisdom to adore the bloom –
Enduring death, though, life leaves enough room
Upon nature’s page and love’s mystery
Seeds its genesis with word- furrowed lines.
I.i.
Arctostaphylos cleaves the hardest tongues,
Riving body’s sound from spirit’s sense.
Call it manzanita, though, and it hangs
There honeyed with art’s apple-tang recompense.
Obtuse as Adam was, could he not see,
Steward and butler of God’s catalog,
That his one task was to match and marry
Art and science in living analog?
Put that way, each laden limb holds the cause
Like that first apple’s bittersweet bite.
Yes, death shined up our parents’ paradise
Leaving time to bear the shriveled berries.
In time, too, Adam and Eve sought a climate
Suited to the words they were meant to eat.
ii.
Amarylis sparkled for a moment,
Mentioned by Virgil, full of blackened ire.
Adam felt your heat, first and last tenant
Residing where pagan poets would retire
Yet could not. Cameos aside, your bloom
Loses itself to perennial autumn
Like Eve who prided her self-prinked plume
In sin’s hothouse, sweating deadly perfume.
Divided, conquered parents scattered seed
Along the mincing route that fled from shame –
Consider how the curse they worked to breed
Eventually bore the same for need
And holy want can break the earth like bread,
Eating the light that takes the family name.
II.i.
Black sassafras breaks new ground between stones
Like Adam cultivating his family tree
Around the world. Through stone, the taproot groans,
Clings to craggy outcrops, overhangs the sea,
Knuckles down against a fallen landscape
Somehow greening its wood from trunk to limb:
A hymn to the dead intones a leaf’s dry scrape
Sounding bones and husks in nature’s anthem.
Standing to relieve the hard-lined horizon
A shrub’s scent scrubs the air. Like an antidote
For wilted history, it finds a purchase
Retailed in rock, blossoming with increase.
A hymn to the quick, wind clears a canyon’s throat
Sounding wings on water, grace’s antiphon.
ii.
Black hellebore on the garden border
Limns the dawn, the first since Eve took offense
At God and stormed out on his green order.
Cross-eyed Adam straddles the garden fence,
Knowing fauna would never draw so near
His nature once the snakes had had their way.
Eve didn’t mind until fanged; the hell she bore
Left her confused and unable to say.
Laboring for bread, birth, breath, all the pain
Endemic to flesh, a madness without cure
Beyond the poison that works its medicine
On Adam called by name by his creator,
Roaming winter’s outlands for spring’s first sign,
Expecting to taste grace in the hellebore.
III.i.
Cercis betrays itself in its crimson
Every spring; this, the Judas tree, with dry pod
Rattling a count of coins and bones. First son
Committed blood to his vegetable greed
Inventing cities with blood sacrifice
Shining like silver in a beggar’s field.
Clematis creeps across its wicker trellis –
Like serial envy’s cereal yield
Entering the heart along a willful path.
Mastered by a thought, God was forsaken
And man murdered – twin sins requiring
The purest flesh to slake the thirst of wrath,
Inventing the pilgrim’s road now taken
Setting off its sojourn from earthly wandering.
ii.
Castor oil plants are universal
As sin. In 1978,
Social enemy Georgi Markov fell
To an umbrella’s tip in a London street,
Object of brotherly hate once more rehearsed,
Resurrecting Abel’s cry from the earth.
One brother is blessed; another is cursed
In this act, man roots himself to homicide –
Losing heaven’s harvest, he gains the world’s dirt.
Plenty of nothing stains his working hands
Like the cavity left by a crushed heart.
Again and again, man’s lost nature finds
Nowhere on earth a place to rest or hide
Abel’s blood – the contract’s ink that never dried.
IV.i.
Daphne, shaded daughter, whom Greek fates ordain,
Apollo’s rueful touch would catch up to you,
Planting you in envy’s divine disdain.
How is it that evil blossoms into
New beauty, green goodness, tragic truth
Emerging the same from impure soil
Dove trees were given wing in, the same earth
On which Cain’s restless destiny would toil?
Virtue’s vessel, the first ark, was Abel’s gift
Extended to God, first born and best kind
Taken from his herds in savage oblations.
Required, though, was the real thing. God would shrift
Eve’s first born in first blood of her second
Even as a third would grandfather nations.
ii.
Dog-tooth violet, your fanged petals deceive
Our eyes. You are no mourning flower – your life
Growls at raining sunlight. So we believe
That you strain your faithful bloom to face the grief
Of shades. Your adder’s tongue makes its whispers
Of air, and we begin to hate the doubt
That cultivates the void within our prayers.
How full is flesh that cannot do without
Violence.
Thus, did Cain suffer to perform
In envy of his brother’s better love.
Our history is sacrifice in the grain
Like Cain’s, a good that wilts in the vein,
Empty as an echo, the final proof
That God alone matters in man’s hollow form.
V.i.
Eleutherococcus, you too belong
Living in this garden, harboring Greek cadence
Enthralling sunlight in your shade, a song
Undoing tired winter. What radiance
Though, hides beneath your shadow-arching limbs?
Here, world in seed, a berry, grain’s pithy husk
Everything goes to ground or, starving, trims
Relevance and takes the sinful soul to task:
Once, a man named Noah knew freedom was
Contingent on the ark-built indwelling
Of every soul. Once men became their own
Coffers, their own fruit bore and ground them down,
Concluding their own radiance swelling
In cataracts of grief that wept the skies.
ii.
European figwort, like God’s heart crushed
Under a mad world’s pressure, you’re the stop-gap
Rupturing through earth as all creation dashed
Over the precipice. Why can we not stop
Pretending our moral voice is a ghost
Elevated to myth abstracted from flesh?
And so we have no means but they tend to dust,
No ends to soothe our hearts, so sore and rash.
Floods, Noah had seen, but this deluge was
Irrigating hell itself. With furrowed brow
God’s wrath cut wide across creation’s face,
Worried with expressions of divine disgust.
Receding rage spread a grinning rainbow,
Translating, like a prism, a word’s promise
VI.i.
Fallopia, named for anatomy
After the fact – the bridge between potent
Life and actual soul – your proclivity
Lends itself to haphazard wall and fence
Of spring, creeping roots on surface and post,
Picking your way across winter’s cold war.
In battle after battle, March has lost
All power under your fire’s quick cover.
Figured in Noah’s naked hands, heaven breached
In prayer’s pigeon beak. Faithless, the raven ran
Glistening black between the sea’s expanse and
First firs poking at the sky. The black wing found
Irrevocable wandering; but man
Rooted his rudderless vessel where it beached.
VI.ii.
“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter,
day and night, shall not cease.”
-Gen. 8:22
French marigold, corona of the day,
Recall the spring’s word that went unwritten
Emerging as winter scribbled away
Notes of melting ice. Your punctuation
Checks winter’s lugubrious paragraph.
How then do you mark the transitory phrase
Making March idle in its Ides and laugh
Aloud before the thaw of your sunrise?
Remember Noah’s first spring, too, the one
Insured by God that every season would
Get a hearing and be numbered in turn;
Obliged to time, He counted suns to burn
Leaves to turn, turning seeds and burning wood;
Dismantling night with day’s golden crown.
VII. i.
Glenditsia, your trinity of thorns
Lean out from trunk and low branch a brandished
Engagement with wilderness. Each cluster warns
Deer and hare away. What if the world wished
It could find your shade without penalty,
Touch your textured bark, taste your honeyed pod,
Subsist as Christ’s cousin on your honey
Imbued locust, painlessly knowing God?
Ararat’s rocky slopes, though, ceded
Grape vines in warp and weft’s old testament
Restoring balance with a vintage joy.
Arbors thriving on thirsty sediment
Provided Noah his first drunk to specify
Exquisitely what the taste of blood needed.
ii.
Golden rod grows by early spring’s roadsides
Ored like an idol from mountainous shade.
Like a tower of language, it fades
Denying all but what its own colors made.
Enchanted eyes will wander far afield,
Numbering starlight as a first attribute,
Redundant as sand’s grain to count the yield
Of April’s garden after March falls mute.
Dead set to turn their minds into heaven, men
Gage a slap to God’s face with false unity.
And dashing men like ants from their proud mound
God grants their tongues a general confusion
Except the yellow star of Bethlehem
Announces spring with lily’s nativity.
VIII. i.
Hazel branch of God’s chosen, splits and bends
At the fork with folksy water-wisdom
Zigzagging, not lost, but loose in the hands,
Engaged in divining its own baptism
Lost beneath the sands that first parched Adam.
Holly breaks soil above deserted lands
Offering its green and red to Jerusalem
Like an emblem: what life wants, God demands.
Yahweh spies such vernal blood in Abram:
Heathen hands await the plow and hoe, the seed’s
Event recalls the steps of this faith from
A place called Ur, the fatherland of gods,
To fields of ripening Canaan where he plants
Hands like roots and veins like vines’ descendants.
ii.
Hyacinthos, another slain godson,
Your purple bruise became your blush and hue.
Ai! Ai! wept the lyric God-sun
Crying his golden light down upon you.
Image of grief, divine yet human,
Nearly touching in its beauty the true
Test of trust, suggesting what faith’s own stamen
Has produced: in blood shed the flower grew.
Hyssop, gather up this blood in your bouquet,
Your bunch of green, your clustered, thirsty green,
So that the father’s son is spared the stain
Suffuse in tinder’s tendered holocaust.
Offended nature stays the hand of noonday
Perspiring aspersions its own would cast.
IX.i.
Illicium, called what you are called,
Let your leaves believe their own sweet perfume,
Let your spice bite with licorice distilled
Into essence that takes another name –
Called what you are called until harvest calls
Irrevocably for anise, pod-entombed;
Until God’s tongue germinates more syllables
Made mouth to mouth, by heart to heart exhumed.
Idesia, you too have multiples
Determining your eastern silhouette.
Each April forms your leaves like hearts anew.
So Abram’s old faith would exfoliate
And winter out his laden panicles
In time to father berries from his bough.
ii.
Iris in flower, iris in the eye,
Resplendent faith survives the famished space
In between: May’s message of earth and sky
Sends word, and each standard falls in place.
Ixia, though, awaits its fulfillment,
Xiphoid leaves and petals inching toward war
In winter’s barren battlegrounds, its moment
Agreed to, kept buried with sword and spear.
Isatis, dyed-in-the-wool dyer’s woad,
Secures indelible seeds with shooting pistils
As Abraham endured his hungry exile
Taking Sarah as sister, Hagar as bride.
Ishmael’s bloodline stained the fabric of gentiles
So Egyptian linen was tinged by God’s will.
X.i.
Jamesia, named for Edwin P. James,
Adumbrates his find beneath its paltry shade.
Memoir writ small, the cloistered cliffbush names
Edwin to its own freedom’s species instead.
Scrabbling on the Rockies for a small hold
In history’s granite fissures, botanist
And plant are tied to one another’s field,
Enjoined as priest and victim, crime and feast.
Priests of mere knowledge, though, produce no art:
Jerusalem built faith on bread and wine;
Athens’ altars, though, thought to make man divine.
Manumitting abolition in his heart
Edwin found in life after 1820
Some of Melkizedek’s mysterious plenty.
X.ii
Jack in the Pulpit’s silent sermon style
Asseverates that forest lore remain concealed
Chasing ghosts that mean to reckon the tale
Kith and kin of root and colm would kiss when told
Names like Iriquois Breadroot and Indian
Turnip, Devil’s Ear and Memory Root;
Hidden truth’s strange covenant with fiction
Enclosed Jack in a taciturn pulpit.
Pitching a tent at blooming dead of noon
Under turpentine shadows, Abraham
Looks for homilies in the parched shimmer
Pulsing the parabolic horizon.
Imagination failed, but good news came
To him anyway at shadeless Mamre.
XI.i
Kennedia, your ugly unthinking head
Emerges in echoes of faithless Sodom
Negotiating bean with political bloom
Navigated by your rhetorical red.
Easy climber, you betray spring’s catholic dead
Deferring sunlit birthright for some damn
Ignobility that gains the cost of shame
As puritan frost will kill your Irish sod.
Kerria, a second generation spoiled,
Emerges, smoldering, like Easter’s rose.
Relative to you, early summer haze
Recalls Gomorrah, its spring defiled
In turning nature against her creed
And lusting to overpower even God.
ii.
Kingcup quaffs its draught of sun and rain
In cordial measures, left flush with your fill
Nodding off until time became Britain,
Gilding swamp and marsh with burgeoning grail.
Caltha palus, May is dying, its weeds
Undone, leaving you looking for burial,
Put to your deed and dropping your dead heads.
Knautia’s crimson makes memorial
Nothing so lush, for its own plotted grave
Abounds in arid soil, and its roots run
Under dusty feet – even as Sarah
Took her rest among the Hittites, in foreign
Interment – as if faith would come alive
Again, reborn among alien flora.
XII.i.
Leucothoe, your sunny death was life
Evolving under a mad lyric sky.
Ubiquitous yet bashful in 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
Obliges 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 eternity between sand and stars.
ii.
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 in your bloom’s candor,
Entreating summer sunlight to embark
Now over soil’s unbuttoned furrows
Replete with shadows as they raise the work
Of bread and days. A fielded figure narrows
Sight, his hard eyes curse the sweat of sun and dust.
Evening’s sky soothes what noon’s blistered hours bleach
Lily-white. Caravans of cool winds crest
Isaac’s soul as love’s slow hooves make their approach
Like anticipation’s growing susurrus –
Yielding God’s lily veiled in hosannas.
XIII. i.
Magnolia, ur-flower, you were there
Around the greening time of God’s own thumb,
Growing between good and evil, and life or
Nothing, prolocutor for each of them.
Or does your gaudy bloom’s magnificence,
Left-over emblem of Adam’s excess,
Intend to play sin’s defective instance
Asking the good of life to bear it witness?
Myrtle, meanwhile, bears its burden of love’s
“Yes” in life’s tangled weave with such fragrant
Rogations that nature plays the faithful servant
To God and man alike and to each gives
Living proof that love can grow abundant –
Entwining blessings through Rebekah’s alcoves.
ii.
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 coin
Of the realm devalued in this Hebrew brood,
Rampant as bad pennies, that seemed prepared
To issue greener species from Isaac’s loin.
XIV.i.
Neolitsea, the Hermit Kingdom’s
Evangelist, with trinitarian
Overtures – Godhead triumphs in each leaf’s vein
Leaving Christ wholly in the white bolly gum.
Insular peninsula, Korea
Tortures itself with the blood of martyrs:
Seven years within its silent borders –
Evangelizing as neolitsea,
Andrew Kim and companions found their end.
Nyssa, though, finds its black gum origins;
Yellow and negligible, its bloom begins
Small, but with room to let its limbs expand –
So Isaac resurrected his father’s wadi
And from it grew the names on God’s family tree.
ii.
New Zealand flax embodies the text for
Evening’s glow: like a match head’s bladed flame
Woven into dark, it spreads its texture,
Zealous to burn, but not a star. The same
Error swingles and heckles in whole cloth
And nets the slender and exotic clades
Loosely equivocal tangle of kith
And kin – whether 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 retted for choice fabric, fought among
Xenophobic tribes, made seamlessly strong.
XV.i.
Oso berry, bitter to taste but good
Sustenance for winter’s summary dreams.
Offered first fruits of spring, by June imbued
Blue, the ripe meat of these Indian plums
Elevates their place as their almond scent
Reveals a sweet lure, the cyanide trace
Redolent as the effort to supplant
Yahweh’s sweet word with silent bitterness:
Ostrya, your iron wood serves to suit
Steel’s ax blade with its handle hewn to hew
Trunk of your trunk – such is wood’s irony.
Rebekah’s silent spring bore summer’s plenty;
Yahweh gave Isaac his firstborn, Esau,
Another blessing bearing bitter fruit.
ii.
Orchid, you hold mankind in rapt regard,
Repay woman’s steadily fondling gaze,
Collecting man’s madness for beauty, starred
High in botany’s soiled paradise.
In your roots, the living principle hangs
Down, the same that for eons delivered
Onychium – the fern’s primeval wings
Nest prehistory’s forest floor with green-feathered
Yields. Like Isaac, simple scion breeding
Complex offspring in opposition. From
Heir to son, though, the line flowers forever
In air and sun that know no fall, seeding
Under earth until death has no power,
Making prime the soil to plant Kingdom Come.
XVI.i.
Plumbago, what eye has not seen your bloom
Laze along a hill, lighter than the lead
Unearthed in the pipe of your ancient 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 the moment’s illusion of time
Oblique as leadwort plumbing a hillside.
Pawpaw echoes the same native neglect
As its name tricks out the true papaya
With syllabics in a mess of derelict
Pottage such as cleverly bought Esau
At cost, devouring a la carte his birthright,
Winning his blessing with Isaac’s appetite.
ii.
Pansy, everywhere you 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 herb basks its proffered whorls in, twinned leaves
Arching rung by rung up the air. Its stem
Rising on 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. Pinks also cut their
Incarnate teeth on day’s divinity,
Numbered among the scaling, sloping envoys
Kairos, kiaros, endlessly about heaven’s joys.
XVII. i.
Quercus endures. This singular sentence
Understates oak’s hard beauty, its late bounty
Embedding its lofty reach and eminence.
Rachel, too, would reach late to offer plenty
Ceded to Jacob but withheld in craft by
Uncle Laban who tested the endurance
Struck deep in his nephew’s grain, tasting why
Quinces first soured Adam’s tongue.
The quince
Undulates its branchwork in an ugly gnarl
Intimating cankered Eden’s rotten shame
Nurtured by Leah’s sweeter eye to bitter
Conclusions. But God was with each daughter
Enlarging by twelve the scope of their fame –
Stipulating roots and limbs of Israel.
ii.
Queen Anne’s Lace shrivels up like a bird’s nest
Under summer heat’s final drum beat: the spring
Equinox long since cast 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 ring a bleeding queen’s crown,
Eavesdropping Ariadne’s web-stitched finesse –
So did God knit pain’s preventive within
Leah’s womb, Israel’s first limb, named Rueben,
Announcing Yahweh’s landscape of largesse,
Christened as sterile sin’s antidote:
Elected the lead thread of Joseph’s coat.
XVIII.i.
Rehderodendron, by your petals’ tongues you
Embroider nature’s elaborate page of white –
Hack-turned-nom-de-bloom, Alfred Rehder knew,
Departing words, to dig for weeds and write
Empty spaces. Ear to earth, all he heard
Resounds in spade and pen. 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 in nature just as Rachel had
Obtained in Joseph a holy freedom
Neither father nor pharaoh could withstand.
ii.
Rush and reed would grow to make common cause
Under cover of sensibility
Shared out in the dry sounds that sing a breeze
Heaping harvests of sheer utility.
Reed and rush would part ways at cutting time,
Each to thatch, caulk, stretch, stitch, bind and report,
Each in its own way, in each its own name,
Discounting discord with waddled rapport.
Rue and rye, though, make a separate peace
Urgent as Jacob and Laban to seed
Evidence of enjoyment beyond use –
Rye and rue, bread of life and herb of grace,
Your bitter loaves heaped-up at Gilead
Engender a sweeter bread to suffice.
XIX.i.
Strawberry tree, your fruit’s a second draft
Traducing original sweetness. The rank
Response on tongue and tooth becomes the graft
Arbutus grasps to its sinewy trunk.
Wrestling weather’s bitter angels, standing fast
By water’s edge, its unbudging form storms
Eire’s shores but leaves shadeless the English coast,
Revising landscape into religious terms.
Ruddy as blood, outlasting autumn’s length,
Your yield, unyielding to even one taste,
Transubstantiates old sweetness into new strength
Relentless as hands that bite a brother’s heel,
Embracing lust and holding God fast and chaste –
Embodied thus, Jacob became Israel.
ii.
St. Dabeoc’s heath blankets ben and bog,
Thick and grey as a monk’s hood. Dawn’s faint blush
Daubs a new day, druid prayer stroking each crag
And stone crop with nature’s broadened brush.
By St. Dabeoc’s name, heath pitched mission tents
Everywhere to shade in the pagan tones
Of low and highlands, graced with crimson tint
Conveying Lough Berg’s altar, like blood from stones.
So Jacob’s spontaneous booths and altars
Hallowing the hollow ground around Salem
Eventually canvassed the land of Canaan
And his pilgrim steps painted – from Adam
To Abraham – gospel gloss and margin,
Hinting at the songs of his shrouded Psalter.
XX.i.
Trembling aspen woodlands crisp their whisper,
Rejoicing with leaves, each a tongue that wags
Epiphany. The delicate clatter,
Multiplying root to crown with bit flags,
Bestirs a sovereign stand against biting
Licks of frost and fire. Strengthened by travail
In their one and many, incorporating
Nature’s paradox by design, they prevail.
Growing in faith determined at Esau’s heel,
And in his new name asserted, Israel gained
Something of the trembling sound that aspens
Perpetuate – refined and redefined,
Embracing God and brother, born to heal
Nations from a million bursting catkins.
ii.
Tidy tips are California’s response
In usual variables, to the manic
Daisies’ uniform stare. Their colors sense
Yesterday and tomorrow’s dramatic
Touch to dream of now condensed and magnified
In summer’s evening, Autumn’s even more.
Prepared to fall, each flat-tongued tip is tied,
Strung up with dreams that winter will not bear.
Tulips, too, pursed their lips, tightly knotted
Until even envied by the wind – betrayed,
Like Joseph, by insanity’s demands
Into rootless netherlands. His wit supplied
Pharoah’s tomorrow by yesterday’s hands,
Starving vanity by folly’s windy trade.
XXI. i
Umbrella plants in somber autumn rooms
Mistake themselves for ancient furniture
But their presence only means to make secure
Reassurances that summer resumes
Endlessly in a terra cotta pot.
Leaves rise and fall, shadow-cycled life sustained,
Leavening daily our entrances – feigned
As our inevitable exits are not.
Pre-possessive creation makes its terms
Lie in dusty corners, sheltering our fear.
As we look at death – its cold room confirms
Nature is not a potted plant – no more
Than Thamar’s womb cultured Juda’s house,
Springing sons to breach with blood her father-spouse.
ii
Umbrella flower, shut within your throat,
Myriad hues await release. Once spring
Became a captive word, stripped of its coat,
Rendered mute by winter’s wasted making.
Eventually your umbels fell away
Like timbered standards. Still, you would maintain
Legions against a late October’s day
And hold your ground among the autumn slain.
For nature’s doctrine leaves its signature note
Like Adam’s apple choking off the tongue.
Of course, your yawning parasols can cure
Whatever starves the year: by spring your song,
Enduring lies that swallowed Putiphar,
Reveals the truth that stuck in Egypt’s throat.
XXII.i.
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 seasons turn by burning suns –
Now hot and high in June, now low and cold
Under 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 curled
Confusion’s kiss around the cursed and blessed
Until Joseph’s cursed journey blessed him with
More than a pharaoh’s dream to save the world.
ii
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, shows hard pain’s high relief,
Expressed with easy petals, to complete
Redress with sorrow’s portrait facing God –
Obedience in her is sunlight’s reward
Now again to bear up victory’s return.
In a similar passage, Joseph stored
Corn and kine, restored Egypt’s common good
And freed his brothers from their hungry scorn.
XXIII.i
Wisteria, at first, at last – always
Invading trellis, pergola, wall –
Succoring selfish suckers with clustered sprays
That, dripping fragrance, fatally strangle
Envied forests of light. Twirled up, Zi ten
Remands its vanity; like veins, each blue vine
Intertwines bruised weather, its blue rain
As foreign as tongues storming blaue regan.
Walnut trees thus bear up the nuts of Zeus
And hang down the lusty strain of godhead…
Love speaks a single language nevertheless,
Neglecting neither native tongue nor blood
Undeterred by grudge or lust, like Joseph’s brain
Transcribing Jacob’s love for Benjamin.
ii
White horehound foreshadows bitter exodus.
Horizon-bound – a slave to winter’s ease
It sees itself as hirsute as Horus
To give the scythe’s demand easy excuse.
Easy, too, Pharaoh steadied hand and heart,
Hovering above horehound’s biting leaves to hold
Osiris purged in vase and set apart,
Reversing brothers bought and brothers sold.
Egypt imbedded 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 darkness dies.
Now Juda, echoing horehound’s shadow, said
“Death’s my brother – life, another, died.”
XXIV.i
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.
Before the Christmas berry’s coming came,
Emaciated winter, withering thin,
Remembered its December with famine,
Recusing claims that true the land’s own 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
Enduring violence for nativity –
So Joseph’s innocence weathered sovereignty.
ii
X-mas rose, you infiltrate our gardens,
Making Christmas unwind Easter’s rebirth
And torture expectations with silence,
Stillness your sole companion beneath the earth.
Rising late, you’re early enough to last
Out winter’s cracked and cankered calendar.
Slowly you strike your petals – and break the fast
Eternity observed in time’s empire.
X marks the garden spot where sorrow bore
Her benefice. Time’s famine brought her low
Evoking flowers from tears. A tiny hand
Reached for and drew up the black hellebore,
Beholding gifts received with debts to owe
Endowing Joseph’s seed with promised land.
XXV.i
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 the land of stated permanence.
Old Jacob came to rest his wrestling hands’
Down on Ephraim before Manassas –
Seeds of time thus bred a son from man as
Yew tree bears the theme for which each bough bends
Earthward, piercing churchyard’s flesh with bone
Working up Yahweh’s plant of resurrection.
ii
Yams, unearthed, solid, hunked, hold nothing sweet,
Although blessed essentially as blood, a boiled
Medicinal that means to eat at root
Something of yarrow’s meaning made manifold:
Yarrow root, reproduce a white flower
And love loves me not, but withers and drops;
Reproduce another, it bleeds over –
Random as straws dropped in total collapse.
Oracular as itching, yarrow heals
Wounds – the way yams absorb earth’s properties –
Rubbing raw Trojan feet hot on the heels
Of fortune cooling the heels of Achilles.
Our heroes heads are everlasting crowns
Topping hills like chance fixed by providence.
XXVI.i
Zizyphus jujuba, your fruit is born
In infant innocence, nestled within
Zion’s crowning hills – tender flesh to thorn,
Yoking destiny to the branch of men.
Passions dulled by your fruit, the Lotus Men
Hibernate in dreams, eschewing your thorn
Undulating in a slow reign within
Souls that die to life and live to be born.
Jacob, too, named the land of death at last,
Ushering in the end of the beginning
Just as Adam brought Eden’s conclusion
Under the guise of fruit whose thorn would last
Beyond his children’s fathers, beginning
A generation without conclusion.
ii
Zingiber, you edge the east of history
In the cornucopia of your root,
Navigating empire, traversing spice route,
Gaining universal appeal – this story
Is a real horn of plenty: medieval
Belief would see the source of your descent
Exalted in Edenic exodus, sent,
Reprieved and rescued far east of evil.
Zinnia, you edge the west of mystery….
In the asterix of your desert bloom
New worlds of color set their suns in starry
Nativity. Cortez among las mariposas.
In God’s garden plot he saw Adam
And heard Joseph name the new genesis.
Epilogue
Carl von Linne would change his name in time
Arriving much as Abram did at Ab-
Raham, Lord of kingdoms, families, and phylum,
Leaving order and to each class a job:
Vindicating Adam’s utter Babel
Of general sinfulness with special grace.
Note Abram’s stamen and Sarah’s pistil:
Love is the word at root that left her trace
Incarnated in each renewed season.
Nativity thus digs for its own dying.
Note, too, these numbered names that sought to sing
Eternity – where man is resurrection
Just as woman is birth – both are naming
Creatures whom God has lent His Dominion.
