Cultivar

 

Photo of Corydalis solida “Beth Evans” from the author's garden

One single name stuck at the end of the binomial,
memento mori for a botanist and their dedication to
certain qualities of the plant: a marble bust set on
a plinth. The plinth has its say, though—irrupting
through pollen blown or carried in, stigma swelling
into seed, seedpod bursting out laughing as it sheds
its appended name, refusing to breed true. I bought
it on impulse, Corydalis solida “Beth Evans”—so
pink!—knowing my friend Beth would smile at how
her namesake shows me early every spring the way
life comes and comes again despite Beth being years
dead. Both of us content that the cultivar name will be
lost, shaken loose, once the bees visit my garden.

Shed

Young Gymnocladus dioicus stems with leaf scars visible.

Dimìtar Nàydenov, 2013

My fingers press on these cold keys and shed
bits of skin too small to see. The wind presses,
too, slips through gaps in the window casings.
A busy wind, chilling my hands while ripping the
last of the winter abscission hold-outs on down.
Leaves shed, dropping off and piling, so slow to
dance. The scars on stems. (I search for the faint
scar on my ring finger, when I took a dull knife and
tried to cut a walking stick from a red osier. The knife
slipped, I cut myself—the shed blood, my red sap,
made payment then, payment now, for the poem.)

Upwelling

Volcanes de lodo, Buzau, Rumanía, 2016
Diego Delso

The wet ground swelling,
pregnant with something I
can’t see. A skin of silt stretched
over a depth, a muddy womb—
who is it that leans in close
to watch as every living thing
makes its way to light?

Offerings

Manzanita Beach, December 6, 2024

Manzanita I

Seeing it, why try
to paint the ocean? Tides come;
death and life, erased.

Cannon Beach, December 6, 2024

Manzanita II

Scoured out, and still
mud-red iron stains remain.
Breath-fog shrouds the view.

Overhead

Red ink sundew (Drosera erythrorhiza) in Lesueur National Park,
September 2021, Calistemon, 2021

A paper cut, then a dark
red bead—heme, the color
of rust or a bookkeeper’s debits.
The oxidizing wick lit from lungs
to toes so we can burn, then burn
what’s left on our funeral pyres.
Living has its costs—debts that
can’t be repaid, all I can do
to rebalance those books is to
ask forgiveness. Still it’s not
enough to lift the stain.

Overhead. The sky, not needing
payment, opens its treasure to me.

Calling

Otter Mound Preserve, Carol VanHook, 2010

Your voice, imagine it—held in
a conch shell, or in the damp
cold breath of an unformed wish.

What would it take to speak
despite a cut throat, or with lungs
fully soaked and drowning?

This is where we meet, then—this
place where there’s no air, soundlessly
mouthing the syllables for “beloved”
since we’ve long forgotten our names.

Biting one’s tongue / Che le sa

Image from this site.

To bite down on the very thing itself
that gives shape to our sounds, voice
to our breath? Holding the idiom close
one would think what we’d say was so
powerful, it required warding off in a
deliberate act of self-harm—and yet
the bite is most often accidental. O
Friend, my wish: please let it shape
every syllable, every blessing and chant
you need to nourish yourself, and if you
bite your tongue let it not be to hold
back, let it be no accident, but rather a
gift of Buddha-heart as it greets your
Buddha-nature—“Che le sa, che le sa.”

My teachers

"Vanitas Still Life," Jan van Kessel the Elder, National
Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Public Domain

The gray sparkling dust on the charnel ground
I’d made. The conceit I had, saying a prayer for
each one I killed, sending it off with an om mani
peme hung and wishes for it to be reborn into a
better life. It saddened me, killing those things,
and yet I saw no way out of it. The birdseed was
alive with moth larvae, the wrappers pierced and
riddled. Even after cleaning out the pantry, more
moths. And so, my mindfulness for the first dozen
larvae, for their suffering as I crushed them, then
the next few dozen, each time the blessing given
wearing thinner, thinner through my breath until
what had been a blessing became a curse, until
I gave up the pretense, killed them with predatory
pleasure. I didn’t want them to suffer yet gave no
mercy, no more prayers, no thought to their pain.

Their gift to me: to see myself clearly, this hollow
reed ingesting and excreting, my sentience mere
paint on a wrapper of chemical processes ending
with my teachers’ guts and broken wings dotting
the kitchen walls, oxidizing in the afternoon sun.