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Semper Plus – Trout Lily

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , 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.

❦

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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2020-09-08b Doughton Park Tree

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Uniquely Itself

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 24, 2023| 8 Comments »

[with 3 poems by Richard Widerkehr]

Cold March drizzle makes Hepatica nod and droop. Nevertheless, the twelve accompany me undaunted on a naturalist hike along Elkin Creek. What will we discover? Here are the last few Hepatica blossoms of the year; their sister plant opened her first bloom along this trail on February 7, five weeks earlier. Now a single flower on each silky hairy scape looks down at its feet, the winter-pocked liverleaves also fading ahead of summer’s foliage. It’s cold this morning and the vernal equinox is still three days off.

But cheek by jowl with old Hepatica are fresh patches of its second cousin, Rue Anemone. No drooping at all! Both from the same family (Buttercup, Ranunculaceae), the two flowers share many features and from a distance look similar – our crew’s task is to learn to tell them apart. Both are easily overlooked, pale blooms only a cm. or so in diameter, with 6-10 petals and a jostle of stamens crowding multiple pistils clumped in the center. Even color is not a reliable clue: the pale Hepatica in this neutral soil is only one shade of lavender removed from Anemone’s white. Rue Anemone’s smooth slender flower stem is one giveaway, and then of course the leaves, Anemone’s fine clusters like little paws climbing toward the bloom, contrasted with Hepatica’s broad, basal, waxy lobes, each like a liver. What some might casually mistake for a clump of sameness, in haste undifferentiated, what we ourselves might at first glance have misidentified have now become familiar, individual: each uniquely itself.

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A Sabbath of Complete Rest

I’ve been thinking what that might mean, so I listen
to the wind in the fir trees outside our red house –
how the trees stand almost like horses asleep on their feet,

how their roots touch crevices in soil, how at night
their branches, blacker than the sky, must not forget
yellow forsythias, summer, their own dark needles,

how they wait, how they’ve waited. This is no psalm
of light, Chloe, no song of white horses in the sun.
The root of the word Shalom means complete.

Richard Widerkehr
from At the Grace Café, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte, NC, © 2021

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How does a poem draw you in? How does it invite you to live in the world it creates? Place must be one way. Just a few pages into At the Grace Café, I realize I’m damp and about to shiver in the Pacific Northwest. Not that it’s raining absolutely all the time – the great dark firs lifting their heavy sleeves also propel me into the landscape. A trail through clouds and mist leads me. A swirling lake shore is mysterious and at once consoling.

Personality is another thread that weaves through these poems and entangles me: the writer’s sister, her mental illness an elusive and threatening animal that speaks wild into every situation; his mother, reminding us that each of us must live a portion of our lives in denial; and the personality of the writer himself, illuminated by recurring heartbreak in his work as counselor and by longing for stability and resolution. Personalities approach and retreat, promise to reveal just as they again withhold – all I can do is hold on and join the dance.

Finally there is joy. Not waiting beyond all conflict or at the conclusion of all sorrows, rather joy that emerges from and lives within these troubles that we all, confess it, share. A fleeting moment with one’s beloved, a brief lifting of fog, moon on snow – a simple singular presence can form us into fellow sojourners. The poem can make us family. The poem may grant us grace.

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Pay Attention, You Say

No, I haven’t read updates about the orca
+++ nursing her dead calf. I try not to get
upset about too many things. Lately,

I write these poems for my sister –
+++ I can’t spare the least insect or angel,
she says. Yes, plankton lined with oil

covers some sea beds. I’ve seen orcas
+++ breach the surface, black and white,
their bodies like mountain sides

sliding under. When we were kids,
+++ my sister and I caught a tiny fish –
she cried, and our mother threw it back.

Yes, there’s the sadness of plankton,
+++ the orcas, snow fields at night.
Last evening on this mental health unit

where I work, a patient I’ll call Carla –
+++ she’d cut her left wrist – she said,
Some scars are mercy and justice.

I let out my breath. At least my sister
+++ no longer sleeps with the moon
in her cardboard box. Now

you point out two otters on the bank
+++ of No Name Slough, how they
their small black eyes on us.

Richard Widerkehr
from At the Grace Café, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte, NC, © 2021

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Crane Flies
O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! – John Keats

In late August, the crane flies
come back, nervously feeling their way
up windows, trying to get out. They flutter
like huge, scatter-brained mosquitoes,
scraping this way and that, sometimes just
hanging as they flex their long
front legs like feelers, emitting
a dull, frustrated buzz.
++++++++++++++++++ Is it light
they want, the world outside?
They can’t get used to glass, its cool
way of whispering about the uselessness
of struggle, also its dry comments
on their death flights.

Each time I sweep these nutty insects
out the window, more fly in, as if
I were the absence they brush against,
their life of sensations
come to an end.

Richard Widerkehr
from Disappearances, The Wind Room Series #4, Radiolarian Press, © 1996, 2003

rue anemone

❦ ❦ ❦

Richard Widerkehr has a new book from Shanti Arts Press, Night Journey. Richard has taught writing in the Upward Bound Program at Western Washington University and has worked as a case manager for the mentally ill.

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IMG_0880, tree

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What Makes Spring?

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , 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.”

2016-05-08a Doughton Park Tree

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