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Semper Plus – Trout Lily

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Erythronium, imagery, Kathleen Wakefield, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, poetry, Southern writing, Stan Absher, Trout Lily on March 31, 2023| 9 Comments »

[with poems by Stan Absher, Kathleen Wakefield, Bill Griffin]

How does science work? What does it mean for me to think scientifically? I notice something (empirical observation); I draw a conclusion (hypothesis via inductive reasoning); I check it out (experimentation, testing the hypothesis); it doesn’t all hang together so I try again, maybe noticing a little more closely (refining the hypothesis).

That final bit is the kicker. Even scientists can be seduced by their theories. Scientific knowledge, however, is never fixed and final. The most beautiful deduction can be proven false by the more precise observation. A posteriori trumps a priori. Anyone can be wrong.

The Naturalist Method is a subset of the Scientific Method. When I lead a nature hike, I advise folks, “Pay attention . . . ask questions . . . make connections . . . share.” And I am not the least bit shy about announcing that I myself don’t know everything. Not knowing (but wanting to!) is my defining characteristic. Semper Plus Discere – Always More to Learn. Bring books!

Which bit me on the butt a few weeks ago. For years I’ve walked a little section of trail where trout lilies carpet the banks every March. The first time I saw them – mottled fish-scale leaves, bright yellow recurved tepals, pendulant maroon anthers – I opened my trusty old field guide and confidently proclaimed, “Yellow Trout Lily, Erythronium americanum.” Firm, final, and correct. Never even gave it a second thought until this spring, when I decided to photograph some prime specimens in my SEEK app to add to my iNaturalist log. Click. Searching. Erythronium umbilicatum flashes up on my screen. No, no, that’s not right. Just shot ‘em from the wrong angle, try again. Every flower, every time the same – Dimpled Trout Lily.

When I got home I tore open my newer guides and references and discovered this: some thirty years ago taxonomists split the one species into two. And this: of the two, Dimpled is by far the most common in the foothills where I live. So how do you tell them apart? After a couple of hours on the NC State plant science websites, and after tracking down online photos (which I ultimately determined were mislabeled as americanum 52.3% of the time) I had my armamentarium. Back to the woods, this time with a hiking group I enlisted to find all the Trout Lily they could, especially ones gone to seed.

And what we observed was this — if still in bloom, no auricle (“ear”) at the base of the inner tepals; if gone to seed, a distinct dimple at the end of the ovary, and often lying prone on the ground. Every dang plant we found was Erythronium umbilicatum. I stand humbled and corrected.

But here is another observation to add to the guide books. Yellow Trout Lily is described as holding onto its style, still attached to the ovary after forming seeds. Many, even most, of the Dimpled we found also retained their style. Maybe we’ll come back in a week and observe again. Maybe notice a little closer.

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Heifer

Destined for slaughter
she wades into the water
to the belly and drinks deep.

Does she see her own sad eyes
wide and innocent in the pool
looking up out of the sky?

Soon fear will make her bellow,
but now her muzzle is cool
and wet. Her skin twitches,

scattering flies; her switch
brushes them off. Across the water
she sees a pasture

she will never graze
a clump of trees
that will never give her shade.

J. S. Absher
from Visions International #107, Black Buzzard Press, © 2023 Visions International Arts Synergy

Erythronium umbilicatum

Erythronium americanum

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Thirty or so poems in a modest package; writers from Europe, Asia, the Americas; no page numbers but a few hand-drawn illustrations – all this and a remarkable meditative companionability create the magic of each issue of Visions International. I ask myself how editor Bradley R. Strahan manages to pull me into these pages so warmly. Some insistent human voice calls us, the readers, to encounter distant circumstances and experiences and realize they have become close, familiar, our own. How has Brad, through the decades, made this so?

My friend Stan Absher suggests: Because he often publishes poets over a long period of years, Bradley’s readers can get to know some poets rather well. I’ll mention only the late Michael Mott (he died in 2019) and Nikolaï Kantchev, a Bulgarian poet who died in 2007 and whom Brad continues to publish in translation, but there are several others.

And Kathleen Wakefield, after reading Issue #107, commented this to Bradley: I love the cadence of these poems, their subjects and very particular visions, language that skewers you or lures you in. Some are simply magical to me, others have the strangeness and dark absurdity, fused with love, that points me back to Simic, one of my favorite poets. So glad you honored him and are always including poets from other parts of the world who write of something vital at stake. All of these poems jar me out of my usual forms of speech. That is a very good thing. It’s not just mental; the heart is altered.

I am honored to appear in these particular pages with two friends I’ve come to know through shared poetry, Stan Absher and Kathleen Wakefield. As I continue to read each issue of Visions, my circle of companions expands.

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Subscribe to Visions International. For four issues, mail $25 to:
Visions International / Black Buzzard Press / 309 Lakeside Drive / Garner, NC 27529

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Summons

1.
I am practicing my lying down
beside the stripped spines of jay feathers,
the azures unwinged, seed heads gone to must
and rot, bones of mice cradled in mycelia
tangled and ghostlike.

I am asking the names of wildflowers to ease me into sleep,
saying them over and over, Bloodroot, Evening Lychnis,
Celandine, Enchanter’s Nightshade, Coltsfoot,
Wood Groundsel dissolving
on my tongue.

The faces of those gone before me rise up,
and those I will leave behind, my children
far flung as seeds carried by wind
and pelt and rain.

2.
Go ahead, let the dankness of earth
seep into your thighs, let dust
silt your lungs, your spine
crack like river ice

but the mind pulls you back up through snake skin and mist,
through dry creek and river bed to the trees’
green asylum, rain smacked leaves
waking you to the body’s arterial hum.

Get up while you can, full of your hunger and regret.
Get up from your knees. Taste
what you are, cloudburst, mud, burnt grass,
words buried in iron, bone, lips, and breath,
in this sorrow and honey,
this skin and ash.

Kathleen Wakefield
from Visions International #107, Black Buzzard Press, © 2023 Visions International Arts Synergy

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Albedo

Rare to discover you
+++++ aloft in the afternoon
your eye so blue
I can see right through
+++++ the curving edge of sight
and your face so bright
+++++ I believe the fire
of your glow must burn
within – but no,
+++++ reflected whole
where you hang on the arm
of your golden man.

Bill Griffin
from Visions International #107, Black Buzzard Press, © 2023 Visions International Arts Synergy

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EARTH SCIENCE: Albedo is a measure of how much light is reflected by the surface of a planet or moon; an albedo of 1 means all light is reflected; an albedo of 0 means no light is reflected – all light is absorbed by the surface and it will appear dark. The albedo of the moon is 0.12, pretty dark as celestial bodies go. Saturn’s moon Encedalus has an albedo of 0.99 due to its covering of snow and ice.

The albedo of Arctic ice is much higher than the albedo of open ocean. As more of the Arctic becomes ice-free in summer, more light (heat energy) is absorbed by the darker water. This has produced a positive feedback loop so that the Arctic is warming much faster then the remainder of the planet.

PLANT SCIENCE: The female reproductive part of a flower is the pistil, composed of the ovary (containing the ovules), the style, a slender column projecting up from the ovary, which is tipped by the stigma. Pollen lands on the stigma and sprouts tubules down through the style to fertilize the ovules and produce seeds. Of the 450+ families of flowering plants containing more than 260,000 species, each contributes its own variation to the configurations and shapes of flower, pistil, and stamen, and the strategies for insuring that pollen and ovule meet.

When the outer whorl of structures on a flower can’t be sussed out as sepals or petals, the blades are often called tepals. Sepals are the outer whorl that cover and protect the bud and petals are the inner whorl, usually colored to attract pollinators. Especially in many members of the Lily family, Liliaceae, the two layers merge or fuse; the term tepal was compounded to describe them.

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What Makes Spring?

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Black Nature, Camille T. Dungy, Claudia Rankine, Ecopoetry, George Marion McClellan, imagery, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, spring on March 10, 2023| 12 Comments »

[with poems from Black Nature]

The world of experience speaks the language of the Absolute. In that language, the language of the universe, all of the metaphors which spring offers must simply mean: LIVE! – – – – Marilyn Nelson

What makes Spring for you?

When I was a first year med student, every lecture paid homage to the History of Medicine (invariably capitalized). Even today when I read of the recent cholera epidemic in Haiti, I immediately remember Dr. John Snow, the father of modern epidemiology, who arrested the London cholera epidemic of 1854 by removing the handle from the Broad Street pump. When I progressed to the clinical wards at Duke, including Osler Ward, history continued its exposition on morning rounds with frequent pithy quotations by Sir William Osler, such as, “A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient,” or, “It is astonishing with how little reading a doctor can practice medicine, but it is not astonishing how badly he may do it.”

One quotation baffled me a bit: “One swallow does not make a summer, but one crescent makes malaria.” I quickly learned to recognize the crescent, that minute malaria parasite living inside a red blood cell, and I spent hours at the microscope trying to find just one. But I had little experience of the natural world outside the lecture hall and the swallow part (Osler riffing on Aristotle, I learned later) made no sense. I was stuffing my head with the vocabulary of microbiology and immunology but never even heard of phenology (the study of periodic biological phenomena). The completion by swallows of their long northward migration each year defines the arrival of summer? Of that I had no clue.

Indeed, one crocus does not make a spring. So what does make spring for you? There’s a stretch of I-40 between Winston-Salem and Kernersville where the surrounding woodland has been sheared back and sun percolates into deep shade. Over the years the native redbuds have leaned into that light. As gray February shuffles so languorously along step by step, a faint golden haze haloes the maples and deepens to peach and brick red. A willow here and there hints of green. It’s coming, it’s coming. Then suddenly, it seems within just days of each other, the redbuds pop their magenta bud covers into lush, rich, raspberry bloom. The solstice hasn’t yet arrived, but for me redbuds do make spring.

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Spring Dawn

There comes to my heart from regions remote
+++++ A wild desire for the hedge and the brush,
Whenever I hear the first wild note
+++++ Of the meadow lark and the hermit thrush.

The broken and upturned earth to the air,
+++++ By a million thrusting blades of Spring,
Sends out from the sod and everywhere
+++++ Its pungent aromas over everything.

Then it’s Oh, for the hills, the dawn, and the dew,
+++++ The breath of the fields and the silent lake,
And watching the wings of light burst through
+++++ The scarlet blush of the new daybreak.

It is then when the earth still nestles in sleep,
+++++ And the robes of light are scarce unfurled,
You can almost feel, in its mighty sweep
+++++ the onward rush and roll of the world.

George Marion McClellan
from Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy, © 2009 University of Georgia Press, Athens GA.

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This week I’ve been spending time with an anthology I’ve been reading off and on over the past year, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy. Cycle Ten, the final section of the book, is titled Comes Always Spring. We have come through nine other cycles, including Dirt on Our Hands and Disasters, Natural and Other; we have been reminded What the Land Remembers; at last we are left with a hope of renewal. What can make Spring for us as a community, as a shared human family?

GEORGE MARION MCCLELLAN (1860-1934) was born in Tennessee and lived in Kentucky. A poet an minister, he attended Fisk University and Hartford Theological Seminary. He published Poems in 1895 and The Path of Dreams in 1916.

CLAUDIA RANKINE, born in Jamaica in 1963, earned her BA from Williams College and her MFA from Columbia University, and now lives and teaches in California. She is the author of four collections of poetry; Nothing in Nature is Private (1995) received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize.

CAMILLE T. DUNGY has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Dana Award, and Bread Loaf. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Besides Black Nature, Dungy is also co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Peoms That Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great.

[biographies adapted from the anthology]

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The Man. His Bowl. His Raspberries.

The bowl he starts with
is too large. It will never be filled.

Nonetheless, in the cool dawn,
reaching underneath the leaf, he frees
each raspberry from its stem
and white nipples remain suspended.

He is being gentle, so does not think
I must be gentle as he doubles back
through the plants
seeking what he might have missed.

At breakfast she will be pleased
to eat the raspberries and put her pleasure
to his lips.

Placing his fingers beneath a leaf
for one he had not seen, he does not idle.
He feels for the raspberry. Securing, pulling
gently, taking, he gets what he needs.

Claudia Rankine
from Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy, © 2009 University of Georgia Press, Athens GA.

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What to Eat, and What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison

1
Only now, in spring, can the place be named:
tulip poplar, daffodil, crab apple,
dogwood, budding pink-green, white-green, yellow
on my knowing. All winter I was lost.
Fall, I found myself here, with no texture
my fingers know. Then, worse, the white longing
that downed us deep three months. No flower heat.
That was winter. But now, in spring, the buds
flock our trees. Ten million exquisite buds,
tiny and loud, flaring their petalled wings,
bellowing from ashen branches vibrant
keys, the chords of spring’s triumph: fisted heart,
dogwood; grail, poplar; wine spray, crab apple.
The song is drink, is color. Come. Now. Taste.

4
Down anyone’s street-bright invitations.
Suck ‘em. Swallow ‘em. Eat them whole. That’s right,
be greedy about it. The brightness calls
and you follow because you want to taste,
because you want to be welcomed inside
the code of that color: red for thirst; green
for hunger; pink a kiss; and white, stain me
now. Soil me with touching. Is that right?
No? That’s not, you say, what you meant. Not what
you meant at all? Pardon. Excuse me, please.
Your had was reaching, tugging at this shirt
of flowers and I thought, I guess I thought
you were hungry for something beautiful.
Come now. The brightness her might fill you up.

7
Daffodils are up, my God! What beauty
concerted down on us last night. And if
I sleep again, I’ll wake to a louder
blossoming, the symphony smashing down
hothouse walls, and into the world: music.
Something like the birds’ return, each morning’s
crescendo rising toward its brightest pitch,
colors unfurling, petals alluring.
the son, the color, the rising ecstasy
of spring. My God. This beauty. This, this
is what I’ve hoped for. All my life is here
in the unnamed core – dogwood, daffodil,
tulip poplar, crab apple, crape myrtle –
only now, in spring, can the place be named.

Camille T. Dungy
from Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy, © 2009 University of Georgia Press, Athens GA.

Mom looks at the Redbud

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And here’s one final epigram from Sir William Osler, dedicated to William J. Blackley MD, my Senior Resident for the first day I arrived on the ward as a green intern: “One finger in throat and one in the rectum makes a good diagnostician.”

More quotations by the master clinician Sir William Osler can be found here:
“The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”

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Triple Mint

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Black Nature, Frank X Walker, Lucille Clifton, nature photography, poetry, Robert Hayden on March 3, 2023| 8 Comments »

[with poems from Black Nature]

Spring is the blinding chartreuse of winter wheat twelve inches high with last year’s corn stubble poking through. Spring is pocks of yellow narcissus in the woods where a settler’s cabin once stood. And Spring is a deepening lilac blanket that seeps across fallow fields like a flood tide blooming – what is that?

Henbit, Deadnettle, and Creeping Charlie, that’s what. As the earliest spring ephemerals are cautiously blooming in the leafless forest, out in broad sun these three are turning the earth extravagant purple. Driving country roads, I’ve often wondered why fields become so colorful before visited by the plow, and when starting out on nature trails to find the real wildflowers, I’ve casually noticed bright pink and magenta sequins in the hardpack around the parking lot but never scrunched down to look.

And for the most part not many want to get to know these three members of the mint family, Lamiaceae. They’re weeds, for goodness sake, and introduced non-natives: Henbit from Europe, Deadnettle from the Mediterranean to Western Siberia, Charlie from almost everywhere in temperate Eurasia. But check out those little flowers, even though they’re smaller than the nail on your pinky: typical Mint with five petals partially fused, a long tube and hood on Henbit, broader lower lips on the other two. Streaked and spotted, really pretty if you kneel, even better with a magnifier. I plucked a sprig of Henbit for Linda and she kept it in water in a bottle cap in the kitchen for a week.

You’ve notice Creeping Charlie, also called Creeping Jenny, when you’ve strolled a neglected lawn and smelled spice from the crushed leaves. Deadnettle and Henbit don’t have the typical mint aroma but all three are edible, raw or stewed, and were probably brought here intentionally by early settlers. Before the discovery of hops, Creeping Charlie was used to brew ale, for flavor and clarity. Which causes me to ponder what these little mints are called – does one accrue more names the farther one wanders from one’s roots? Creeping Charlie especially – known as Alehoffs, Cat’s Foot, Field Balm, Gill-over-the-hill, Ground-ivy, Hay Maids, Runaway Robin (and there are at least three other totally unrelated plant species that go by the moniker Creeping Charlie).

Gotta go now – in a few minutes it’ll be too dark to go out front beside the road and pick my salad.

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Can’t leave out their secret true names:
Lamia amplexicaule
Lamia purpurea
Glechoma hederacea

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Locus

for Ralph

Here redbuds like momentary trees
+++++ of an illusionist;
here Cherokee rose, acacia, and mimosa;
here magnolias – totemic flowers
+++++ wreathing legends of this place.
Here violent metamorphosis,
+++++ with every blossom turning
deadly and memorial soldiers,
their sabres drawn, charging
+++++ firewood shacks,
apartheid streets. Here wound-red earth
+++++ and blinding cottonfields,
rock hills where sachems counseled,
where scouts gazed stealthily
+++++ upon the glittering death march
of De Soto through Indian wilderness.
+++++ Here mockingbird and
cottonmouth, fury of rivers.
Here swamp and trace and bayou
+++++ where the runagate hid,
the devil with Spanish pistols rode.
+++++ Here spareness, rankness harsh
brilliances; beauty of what’s hardbitten,
knotted, stinted, flourishing
+++++ in despite, on thorny meagerness
thriving, twisting into grace.
+++++ Here symbol houses
where the brutal dream lives out its lengthy
dying. Here the past, adored and
+++++ unforgiven. Here the past –
soulscape, Old Testament battleground
of warring shards whose weapons kill.

Robert Hayden
from Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy, © 2009 University of Georgia Press, Athens GA.

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This week I’ve been spending time with an anthology I’ve been reading off and on over the past year, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy. The poems are arresting and transporting. I’m drawn to them for the nature, and for the black nature. Many of the poems evoke a deep, heartfelt connection to this earth, and many of them speak in voices and share messages I haven’t found in other nature poetry anthologies. Or haven’t found in quite the same tone. Always more to learn, imagination always expanding, life always becoming larger.

ROBERT HAYDEN (1913-1980) published his first collection of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust, in 1940. He received the grand prize for poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senega, in 1966 for Ballad of Remembrance. Hayden was appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1976, the first African American to hold the position.

FRANK X WALKER, born in 1961 in Danville, KY, is a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets and a recipient of the 2005 Lannan Literary Poetry Fellowship. He has authored four poetry collections and edited two poetry anthologies, and serves as the editor of Pluck! Journal of Affrilachian Art and Culture.

LUCILLE CLIFTON (b. 1936) has published thirteen books of poetry, a memoir, and more than sixteen books for children. Her honors include the 2001 National Book Award, an Emmy Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and the 2007 Ruth Lilly Prize, among many other awards and honors. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and she has served as Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland.

[biographies adapted from the anthology]

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Wind Talker

+++ Ocian in view! O! the joy.
+++ William Clark

If I could make my words
dress they naked selves in blackberry juice
lay down on a piece a bark, sheep
or onion skin, like Massa do

If I could send a letter home to my wife
gloat it in the wind, on wings or water

I’d tell her ‘bout Katonka
an all the wide and high places
this side a the big river.
How his family, numbering three
for every star in the sky
look like a forest when they graze together
turn into the muddy M’soura
when the thunder along, faster than any horse
making the grass lay down
long after the quiet has returned.
How they don’t so much as raise a tail
when I come ‘round with my wooly head
and tobacco skin, like I’m one a them
making the Arikar and Mandan think me
“Big Medicine”
Katonka, who walks like a man.

Today we stood on the edge a all this
looked out at so much water
the mountains we crossed to get here
seem a little smaller.

As I watch fish the size a cabins dance in the air
and splash back in the water like children playing
I think ‘bout her an if we gone ever be free
then I close my eyes and pray
that I don’t live long enough
to see Massa make this ugly too.

Frank X Walker
from Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy, © 2009 University of Georgia Press, Athens GA.

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mulberry fields

They thought the field was wasting
and so they gathered the marker rocks and stones and
piled them into a barn +++ they say that the rocks were shaped
some of them scratched with triangles and other forms +++ they
must have been trying to invent some new language they say
the rocks went to build that wall there guarding the manor and
some few were used for the state house
crops refused to grow
I say the stones marked an old tongue and it was called eternity
and pointed toward the river +++ I say that after that collection
no pillow in the big house dreamed +++ I say that somewhere under
here moulders one called alice whose great grandson is old now
too and refuses to talk about slavery +++ I say that at the
masters table only one plate is set for supper +++ I say no seed
can flourish on this ground once planted then forsaken +++ wild
berries warm a field of bones
bloom how you must I say

Lucille Clifton
from Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy, © 2009 University of Georgia Press, Athens GA.