Wolf’s Bane [4.77]

Wormseed, treacle [2.188]

Wormwood [3.26]

Wormwood, glacier [3.28]

Wormwood, holy [3.28]

Wormwood, sea [3.27]

Wormwood, silky [3.28]

APPENDIX B

Pedanius Dioscorides in His Backyard Plot, c. 2019

Once a riverbed. Now sediment and dead debris

like twigs, seeds, the birds dispersing gossip,

erroneous if well-meant. Fifty kilometers an hour

the wind plagues the neighborhood with desperation.

Jackhammer clouds, an outbreak of construction

—steely crashes, natter, rat-unrest. Hard at it

a hardhat surgical crew scrapes the myelin-piping

infrastructure. Exposed road grows pylon, famine weed.

In god’s name the rototilling! The limb-sized roots.

A crypt of roots and endings. The digging never stops.

(When sun falls the medallion glass patio lanterns,

clementine and aquamarine, go up.) Clear-winged moths,

mosquitoes, a tease of tongue and … not night-torpor,

more sardonic, scornful, then, like clockwork, a mockery

of egg-laying aphids (calling them plant lice calls up twice

the revulsion), dripping siphunculi, sticky honeydew, the piss.

APPENDIX C

Gazetteer of the Backyard

(In Which Pedanius Dioscorides Takes Stock)

from aerial view of backyard

Part 1. Uprooted the Early Sky

1

Luminous flowers and luminous insects. Fire lilies and fireflies. Heat confined on the Earth by the Air. Evening star in the low west. Northern flickers, starlings, phosphorus and August.

Perseids seed the 3b hardiness zone. A zone of zahara starlight zinnias. Double clusters and heliotropes, sunflowers under Swift-Tuttle showers. Orbits of high-heaped cloudberries. A royal poet of a sky!

2

Morning cock-crows an aurora of Phoenician purple and Tyrian sea-snail. By last night’s leaf the embroidery ladies talked and walked me off my legs! “The garden is a three-fold mahogany screen with hollyhock and sweet-pea. A weave of violet and bindweed with a weft of aristocratic toga.” O thorn and thistle me already.

3

How many bags of sheep shit? How many bales of peat? Ten weeks of drought, eight weeks of deluge and gloom. The odd sunny day with a wind that knocks the bean stalks flat on their backs. And the weeds …

My rows bode bad with wode whistle, cheatgrass, bad man’s oatmeal, and yolky toad-flax—a blunder garden! The missteps, the false alyssum, the prolifically prolix knapweed … a pervasive invasive creep. Taproots tapping my optimism.

4

A yard is not a yard without birds. The front beds dense with crowfoot violet, bloody cranesbill. The lawn a skirmish of gooseneck loosestrife and chickweed. Back here by Jupiter’s beard the magpies plunder my seed heads, a sharp-shinned hawk skewers the view from the neighbor’s garage. Gayfeather, the sparrows, Veronica, the wandering chickadees, blue spikes and jays, flecked plumage.

On the south side of the yard, rowan berries, Siberian peashrub, ninebark slough. The fipple-winded linden (that heart-leaved stalwart) is the backyard axis mundi. Mother of thousands thrice the brindled catbird’s mewed! Gray catbird sings from the catbird seat, a high-branch fermata, a basswood basso continuo, a sustained hush-hush surveillance.

5

Ten degrees and counting to the waggle-forage, the waggle-run, the long-corolla bee balm, the catmint, the nasturtium. Magnanimous bees and magnanimous bee plants. Holy hyssop purges the soil, woos the gypsy cuckoo bumblebee. Bombus borealis whoops the virtues of Venus, the whorled mint, the wild horsemint, the mint of no remorse.