Charisma. Compassion. Imagination.

Ebb tide and nostalgia. Groundcover

and climbers. Floribunda. Abundance.

…

A hybrid of bruise and steep, petal and dreg.

Lungfuls of lamp flower, rose campion,

rose of heaven. The moon shoulders roseroot,

rosy-colored stonecrop. The neck laced with

French rose, common rose, pomander of roses.

…

At the center of the garden the heart.

Red as any rose. Pulsing

balloon vine. Love in a puff.

Heartseed, heart-of-the-earth.

A continuous flow of red.

8

List

Nosebleed, staunchweed, sanguinary.

Thousand-leaved root of yellow.

Thousand weed with leaves like feathers.

Small birds flirt herb-of-Venus’ tree.

If my love love me, nosebleed and yarrow.

…

Feverfew-profuse June and July.

Agueweed, sweating-plant,

boneset with yellow thrum.

Venus yields to water.

Boneset breaks the sun.

…

Past mudwalls and molehills,

where the cowslips and the lungs moss,

hedge bells, morning glory and the hundred-leaved

rose, all the livelong organs rose—

a catalogue, a desire, a wish.

9

Life everlasting

Chaffweed whups the chin-cough.

Venus hiccups dry wind and sandy rows.

The garden ruminates cudweed,

creeping roots June through September.

Pearl-flowered. Eternal flower.

…

Take flower-gentle.

Take knitbone and knitback.

Ass ear. Blackwort. Slippery root.

Saturn’s orbit comfrey-picked and sea-goat-prickly.

Take sea wrack, knobbed wrack, bladderwrack.

…

Forget-me-not. Forget-me-not. Forget-me-not.

Mouse-ear to the ground. Borage for courage.

Self-heal. All-heal. By crook or by hook-heal.

Paralysis and palsywort the garden

supplants fool’s parsley with imperatives!

10

Viola organista

La voilà! Horsetail and paddock-pipes.

A hurdy-gurdyish drone.

Pansy-meek with cattail and fretted tension.

(Love-in-idleness.)

The over-thinking viola.

…

Liverwort, liverleaf, liverweed. A low sun

and Jupiter presumes three-lobed hepatica.

Water hectors wind and wind blows sound

into lungwort, bladderwort, kidneywort,

the kidney-leaved sower weed, the hartwort.

…

Dame de coeur. The crowning heart.

The garden wants it all: leaf, stem, root,

the whole shooting match shoot system,

timbre, pitch, fully chromatic rows,

heart trefoil and arssmart under sun.

Where Horsetail Intersects String

quillwort

Equisetum hyemale (Rough Horsetail)

after a photograph by Karl Blossfeldt

Let the fossil record show:

Green of two winters;

Small scale fluctuations;

Multi-tempoed scouring-rush;

Rough scrub-music horsetail;

Amplified 40-fold brusque bray;

Silica-encrusted corrugations;

A living fossil cross-section;

Reedy wetland habitat;

Pewterwort the sonorous tin-herb;

Cone an E-flat apiculate pitch.

Ferns and Fern Allies

The great fern radiation.

The origin of the dysfunctional family: spores.

Friend or foe? True fern or ally?

Extend a hand the fingers curl like a violin scroll.

The chin rests on a wet scouring rush.

Flat vascular depression upsets the pitch range.

Acoustics thick-walled and globose.

A music of neither seed nor flower.

Terrestrial chimeric. An amalgam.

Bladder-fern. Adder’s-tongue.

Where horsetail intersects string.

Where tone color is quillwort.

Spiny-spored or large-spored?

Bristle tips or conspicuous tufts?

Upper bout an upswept moonwort.

Lower bout a smooth woodsia.

Diminutive growing in low fronds.

Rhizomes erect to ascending in perfect fifths.

Catkin-Bearing Trees and Shrubs

Pollination by wind and a long-held note.

Spring’s purr neither feline nor familial.

The woody scale of a fruiting catkin.