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Garden Physic

Sylvia Legris
Contents (60)
  1. Garden Physic
  2. The Yard Wants What the Yard Wants
  3. Plants Reduced to the Idea of Plants
  4. Plants Further Reduced to the Idea of Plants
  5. The Garden Body: A Florilegium
  6. Where Horsetail Intersects String
  7. Equisetum hyemale (Rough Horsetail)
  8. Ferns and Fern Allies
  9. Catkin-Bearing Trees and Shrubs
  10. Violet
  11. Viola
  12. White Flower II
  13. Root of Scarcity
  14. Corn Crowfoot, Corn Buttercup
  15. Grasscloth
  16. Grasscloth (Millefleur)
  17. Wallpaper
  18. William Morris in His Disappointment Garden
  19. Floral Correspondences
  20. My Darling,
  21. Dear,
  22. My Dear Love,
  23. My Dear,
  24. My Darling,
  25. My Dear Love,
  26. Oh Darling,
  27. O’ My Love,
  28. My My My,
  29. My Own Own Darling,
  30. My Dear Love,
  31. Dearest,
  32. Darling,
  33. De Materia Medica
  34. THE CONTENTS
  35. THE OATH
  36. THE DEDICATION
  37. SO BLOOMS
  38. Prelude
  39. Flowers of Brass [Book 5.88]
  40. Habitat
  41. Origins of the Poem
  42. So Blooms—
  43. So Blooms—
  44. ’Struth—
  45. “Pick me … ”
  46. “Pick me … ”
  47. So Blooms the Aromatics
  48. Near Running Water, Streams, and Creeks
  49. So Blooms the Garden of Creatures of Land and Creatures of Sea
  50. APPENDIX A
  51. APPENDIX B
  52. APPENDIX C
  53. APPENDIX D
  54. APPENDIX D (1)
  55. APPENDIX E
  56. APPENDIX E (1)
  57. APPENDIX E (2)
  58. Notes and Sources
  59. Index
  60. Acknowledgments
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Garden Physic

Also by Sylvia Legris

The Hideous Hidden

Pneumatic Antiphonal

Nerve Squall

Iridium Seeds

Circuitry of Veins

Garden Physic. By Sylvia Legris, with maps, illustrations, and photographs by the author. A New Directions Ebook Original.

Copyright © 2021 by Sylvia Legris

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP1516) in 2021

Design by Marian Bantjes

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Legris, Sylvia, author, illustrator.

Title: Garden physic / Sylvia Legris ; with maps and illustrations by the author.

Description: New York, NY : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2021. Identifiers: LCCN 2021031344 | ISBN 9780811229906 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780811229913 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.

Classification: LCC PR9199.3.L3945 G37 | DDC 811/.54—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031344

New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

ndbooks.com

and gardens exist, horticulture, the elder tree’s

pale flowers, still as a seething hymn

— Inger Christensen

(translated by Susanna Nied)

The Yard Wants What the Yard Wants

caragana

Plants Reduced to the Idea of Plants

The flourish, the fanfare, the febrifugic feverfew.

An oleaginous emplastrum—with horehound leaf,

olive over olive, the oily parts, the dry.

An antidote for the unblessed, the blistering,

the dourly flowering flora, the corpse flora.

Greek turned Latin turned inordinately

angled and filed.

Plants reduced to the idea of plants reduced to woodcuts

(circa 16th century) reduced to Victorian floor tile.

Travel by river snail, by liver of mad dog.

By God Greek Juniper! By monoxide of lead.

Travel under government of the moon

with arrach wild and stinking.

Flower and seed through August from June.

The butcher, the barber, the oil-boiling cauterizer.

The vegetal assiduousness, the pennywort diligence.

Plants Further Reduced to the Idea of Plants

1st: Confirm

the morphological integrity of the garden body.

Ignore the blood and hairy root saw,

the skin under its nails garden claw.

Expose the corpus hortus siccus,

the corpus exsiccatae.

2nd: Field

the spiral-rung, the stitched, the strung,

the Cerlox-spined, the glue-gunned,

the Duo-Tanged (le cerveau bilingue),

the never perfect perfect-bind,

the Peterson-worthy field guide.

3rd: Forget

the church fathers, the philosophers,

the appropriate and inappropriate authorities.

Forget the know-it-all anthologists,

the squirrelers of curios and collectibles.

The Garden Body: A Florilegium

1

An ensemble of aromatics

A pepper of bees opens the pupils.

Chorus aphrodisia, mariner’s root,

bright sky and night star, heavenly

rainbow. Amethyst, azure, blue

flower de luce. Flowering ring.

…

White archangelic the bee nettle,

the dead nettle. A hide of nettle cloth,

of finely nerved sedge. Take heed

the edges, the pipes, the passages,