In the Kingdoms of Nature the final authority is earth.

Part 2. Flowers of Brass

The virtues of earth are the virtues

of guts, gall, metallurgy, and nerve.

Earths showy and not showy.

Earths sapid and insipid.

Earth that tastes of copper and zinc.

Earth as bland as coral and chalk.

*

So sits the garden in vegetable pride.

Plotted in graphite and plumbago.

Strange metals and stranger flowers.

Gold salts and leadwort, frothy silver.

A garden of Cyprian earth fired in kilns.

A garden of white lead scraped and pounded.

Flowers of cadmium from red-hot brass.

Of brass burnt from the nails of ships.

*

Silver slag, iron slag, lead slag.

Petals and leaves spit from earth.

Seeds of metallic scales.

Scales like glittering millet.

Brass in the pitch of thundering Zeus.

Brass in the scale of a Delphic hymn.

Part 3. Chaff

Flowers inscribed on stone.

Flowers in a single melodic line.

Alloy shavings.

The brassy chaff.

Flowers of chutzpah and cheek.

*

The yard is a measure of several millennia.

A yard of stars and amalgams.

A yard of grama grass and asters.

Day’s eyes and damned yellow composites.

Petals that open at dawn and close at dusk.

Flowers with conspicuous bracts.

Grasses circled by hair.

Spikelets housing tiny flowers.

Florets of malleable elements.

*

Needlegrass.

Saltgrass.

Alkaligrass.

A choir of melicgrass.

Wry wry the wild rye!

[Book 2]

Lyme grass, marram grass, matgrass.

Darnel and cheat. A suppository of emmer wheat.

Habitat

Bentgrass interrupted.

Redtop and creeping bent.

Lake margins and drying shores.

Vernally flooded streams.

Disturbed ground including shores of moving water.

Disturbed areas adjacent to freshly seeded lawn.

Gardens and other human-disturbed places.

Waste places and roads, roadsides and ditches.

Spare the ferule and proliferate the fescue.

Clearings and sand dune complexes.

Rocky banks and eroded prairie hillsides.

An infinity of motes of minor value, twigs and straws.

Bluff, bluff, bluff, then fells of foothills fescue.

Slopes of bluebunch and proliferous red.

Brush meadow highs and anklebone lows.

Scree fields and debris, talus slopes.

River-rush, prairie-rush, spike-rush and club-.

Hairy and knotted, the confusing rush.

The many-flowered rush of muskeg and peaty shore.

Ravine slopes, ravine bottoms, sloughs.

[Book 4]

Poet’s jasmine to oil the senses.

Poet’s narcissus to loosen the joints.

Poet’s cassia to tap the roots.

Origins of the Poem

1. Sepia [Book 2.23]

Byproducts of chemical deterrence.

Taste-by-touch startle displays.

Phagomimicries.

Atrocious pen-and-ink fish.

Ink-slinking cuttlefish.

Pseudomorph decoys.

Ink amended with mucous.

Shells rubbed on rough cheeks.

Crusty matter pounded to powder and pill.

Cuttlebones of buoyancy.

2. Ink [Book 5.183]

Paintings executed by fire or heat.

Documents signed with shellfish and soot.

Soot gathered from torches.

Soot mingled with Benjamin gum.

Antiseptic pastes of bulls’ glue and soot.

Glass-making spinoffs.

Tree tumors and gall.

Burned copper and blue vitriol.

Neolithic lamb’s-tongue tattoos.

Thick salves that grow new skin.

*

Plants for rough tongues and running ears,

for honeycombed ulcers and dreams of bees.

Plants as antidotes, as amulets,

for broken bones and broken flesh.