Bohemian and sozzled on nostalgia.

mountain ash

Iris [Book 1.1]

Wild iris, flowering ring of grief and love lost.

With vinegar incises fatigue.

With honey cuts annoyance to the roots.

Bear Root, Bald-money [Book 1.3]

Glabrous bear root pounds the rheumatic chest.

Honeyed bald-money, kingly gentian.

Ruled by Mars in sunshine blue-starred and conspicuous.

Steep in wine to defeat stones and impediments.

Christen felwort for falls and sprains.

Draw a grassland hip bath for griping pain.

ninebark

Pomegranate, Carthaginian Apple [Book 1.151]

A wild pomegranate tree.

A tree that promises to explode.

Fruit as fragmenting bomb.

Fruit of the many-seeded dead.

Seeds of semiprecious provenance.

Seeds that detonate garnet.

Flowers that yield astringent dye.

Flowers that yield harsh nectar.

Nectar that keeps loose teeth fastened.

Nectar that stops the blood-spitter spitting.

A quick-witted pomologist gobs a spitball.

A fruitful pomologist lobs an apple-grenade.

Divine blood- and fire-filled.

Wind flowers and thunder claps.

Mercury offers up rain and tricks.

Mercury offers up subterfuge and flash.

Juniper [Book 1.103]

Whence the wind arises volatile juniper.

Unparalleled and solar.

The violent violet stench.

The serpent-driving fumes.

Burn the bark, scrape the dust from the wood.

Bitter berries expel bitter wind.

Oil of juniper remedies viper bite.

Spirit of juniper restores sore sight.

Sweet Flag, Sweet Sedge [Book 1.2]

Moon over bastard flag.

Summer gushes sweet rush and myrtle sedge.

Wild on the edge of pond and marsh.

Wild on the margins of lake and mud.

Where water overflows: Acorus.

Where moors overflow: False iris.

A retina of bees, the pupil of an eye.

The sidelong-glancing rhizome.

Cinnamon sedge, calamus and gladdon:

A spirituous tincture;

A recuperative cataplasm;

Passé poets and potestates;

A poultice by any other name.

A Caldarium of Bacteria

Through a halo of muscle-burn and fatigue.

Under swimming corpuscle light.

When the flora breaks down.

When the hedge is scraped naked.

So blooms the garden

of topical salves and microbial salvos.

Grime from the Baths [Book 1.34]

Jupiter Vesuvius! this

Herculean accretion

of volcanic mineral

and metallic slag,

sheeps’s tallow boiled

with cedar ash,

dust, skin, plaster—

scrapings from the bath.

Robust and rubicund

the rub a dub rubdown,

the salved, the weary,

the Attic-honeyed muscles

crushed. Rubbed ruddy,

rubbed raw—Gad!

God! the crud toe muck,

the goat soap scut.

Dubbed scrubwall.

Dubbed scrubland.

Grime from the Wrestling School [Book 1.35]

Uck the grimy volte-face mat reversal.

The hip heist. The headlock. The ankle pick.

Duck the high crotch leg setup (heralds

the wizzer, levels the lower body takedown).

Quick freestyle turn, back-flat, the mat rolls

a gazzoni, grunge-prone, RUB•A535-exposed.

Back-arch analgesic it, the tight waist, the cross-face,

the barrel roll-Voltaren, the lift, the switch, the sit out.

Grime from the Gymnasium Walls [Book 1.36]

Invigorating lengths of strength and beauty

(hamstrings, deltoids, squatted and planked)

amidst a calisthenics of mushroomy wall-covers.

The gym walls have cures. Spackling-salve,

putty-jam, plaster-dust dermabrasion. Tacky