The Garden Body: A Florilegium

 

White archangelic the bee nettle,

the dead nettle. A hide of nettle cloth,

of finely-nerved sedge. Take heed

the edges, the pipes, the passages,

the petal corridor, the corolla tube.

 

A blossom is a throat. Rose oil and hip.

A ripped rose is a voice organ, time-cut

and curt. Royally red and confidence-

keeping, redder than Mars, redder than

hot days and parched, Venus on the lips.

 

   

White-spotted hellebore under Jupiter

and wind. Oak lungs, jovial lungs.

Sea rush blows the lungs with sweet rose,

carmine and sanguine, flaming red.

Candleberry fires the blood.

 

Red is antispasmodic, cardiovascular.

Great garden patience of Mars.

May-blossom, hawthorn. Spring

gushes red-veined with sorrel, bloodwort

below Jupiter, red dock for longevity.

 

   

Double tongue. Bay laurel.

Daphne of the sun.

Yarrow charms wasps,

snuffs the inveterate headache.

Daphne sings the bees from the ears.

 

The voice reeds are a Queen Anne’s lace

of wasps. Mercury abounds with buzz

and wild carrot, jump-starts speech

with hoar-strange words, a gargle

of hog’s fennel and brimstone wort.

 

   

Lightning sulfur the garden prone

to primrose and paroxysm. Pellitory-

of-the-wall quells old hacking. An old cough.

A new moon courtesy of wild clary.

Eyebright. Clear eye (en toute bonne foi).

 

Sweep away the broom, the burdock,

the beastly antipathy between ash tree

and adder. Snakeweed. Dragon’s blood.

Devil’s bit. Serpent’s tongue. Wickedness

(a weak moon) licked & licked & licked.

 

   

So the garden bellyaches. So what

the gripes? Rows rife with tormentil,

gallant herb of the sun. Five fingers,

flesh and blood. Stamina, life’s long

thread, root-red, the unhindered heart.

 

Leaves respire and rain returns blood-veined

and blood dock, blood-colored juices. Red poppy

a headache. Heartichoke the downhearted.

Loosestrife calms the fugitive scarlet.

Sweet slumber. The fleshy rootstock.

 

   

The loves of the plants. (The economy of vegetation.)

Root, pith, lobes, plume, calyx, coral, sap.

Air distributes the seeds of names.

Windflower, digitalis. Tipsy and ethereal.

Trade winds, vital light. Seeds within seeds.

 

Start from the soil, and win their airy way.

The fifty-seeded heart’s delight, saturnine

and doting wild. Heart’s-ease. Herb constancy.

Pensée    ...    An opening. Call-me-to-you. Kiss-her-

in-the-buttery. Meet-me-in-the-entry.

 

   

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.

 

   

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.

 

   

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.

 

Paralysis and palsywort the garden

supplants fool’s parsley with imperatives!

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.

 

   

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.