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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.

❦ ❦ ❦

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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Old is New is Old

Posted in Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Calostoma lutrescens, imagery, Kathleen Wakefield, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, poetry, Silver Birch Press on February 4, 2022| 8 Comments »

[poems by Kathleen Wakefield]

A slew of 35 degree days and 20 degree nights make the rare and lovely snow hard as a skillet and slick as spilt grease (olive oil in my case). Our favorite trails want to maim us. I tried walking down the ridge back of our house and made it about twenty yards before I realized just one slip and I’d be sliding on my butt all the way into Dutchman Creek. When I turned back uphill I couldn’t take a step. My trekking poles wouldn’t pierce the crust.

Yesterday I ventured back to Grassy Creek and the MST for the first time in two weeks. Shaded areas were crunchy and slippy but sunkissed slopes had cleared. As I hiked I was specifically looking for leaves poking through the snow to photograph: cranefly orchid, wild ginger, pipsissewa. And then I came upon eight little alien life forms such as I’d never seen.

Imagine a thumb-sized lemon cupcake with a beak of orange icing in the center. The cupcake papers peel back to make a grungy collar. Each little cakelet is elevated on a 3 inch tangled stalk like chewed up rutabaga or moldy hemp. One of the cupcakes is broken and oozing white custard. And they are all peering through the snowy crust as if they intend to take over this dormant and unsuspecting planet.

I figured weird looking = fungus. After much searching I learned their identities – Calostoma lutrescens. Yellow-stalked puffball (not actually in the same clade as true puffballs), “pretty mouth,” or “hot lips.” Listed as common in the Southern Appalachians. Shoot, thought I’d found something new and rare. On the other hand there was only this one little cluster of eight fruits in four miles of trail; their little cupcakes will no doubt dry, shrivel, and disappear within a few days; I’d certainly never seen anything like them before.

Common does not preclude rare. Old they are, but new to me.

. . . . . . .

Why We Do Not Cut the Meadow Down

It establishes itself like the sea.
We ride its swells.
Two kinds of dragonfly, cobalt and crimson,
a pair of catbirds, orioles skim the tops of the grasses,
insect glints, multitudes unnamed.

Once it was an orchard, a woods,
before that a real sea that left us a lake.
Today the dry meadow is all fire and pulse –
hot sputter of crickets, bees cruising the nightshade,
the wings of a small white butterfly dipping at this and that,
yes and yes above the brasses where light assembles.

The meadow admits stray saplings, cottonwood and ash.
Opens to rain like a body full of desire.
The fringed flags of the grasses take note of
the least wind: when you think it’s still
a cloud of pollen swells and lifts.

The meadow does not mistake the seed –
scutcheoned, tasseled or winged – for anything else
Whatever comes into the meadow, earthworm, black beetle, ant,
feels the long fall of sunlight on its back
before it descends.

Kathleen Wakefield
+++ from Grip, Give and Sway, Silver Birch Press, © 2016

. . . . . . .

Reverent. Grateful. Seeking. The poems in Kathleen Wakefield’s Grip, Give and Sway require attention from the reader but they hold nothing back. Their beauty bewitches but also unsettles, like dawn when the dark forest holds its breath and anticipates light. Gradually the shapes of trees arise. I found myself reading each poem twice, then again, to take in everything it wanted to impart.

Each of the book’s four sections has its own subtle voice: imagistic and deeply rooted, lyrical and lingering on the tongue, lightly touching the moment to make it universal. In the final section the invisible stenographer observes and records the millennia and their follies but sometimes forsakes her reserve and becomes a participant. This is a book that inspires both deep feeling and deep thought, that invites contemplation about what is within us and what is without us.

. . . . . . .

The Invisible Stenographer Tries Not to Look in the Mirror

What would she see –
++++ ++++ ++++ transparency
of oxygen, or eyes smudged with kohl?

Head-binding wimple.
++++ ++++ ++++ Sky blue burkha.
Iron brank tearing into the tongue
which said too much.

A cat mask, candle-lit, trimmed
with gold sequins and feathers
++++ ++++ the color of a bishop’s robe.

Hematite lips, lips drawn in rose madder;
cheeks ash streaked; tattooed;
++++ white powdered, porcelain smooth

++++ A single pearl drop earring
dangling above a creamy ruff
++++ ++ of belgian lace
stained from centuries of use.

Is everything she sees
who she is?
++++ Why not a coiled forest of dreadlocks,
or the shapeliness of a head
shaved to the cool shine of the moon?

Or worry crossing a woman’s brow
++++ like cloud shadow troubling a wheatfield,
as if she were remembering a stove
on at thome, the child left
too long alone.

. . . . . . .

Rumors

All night the bee that’s clung
++++ to the sunflower, dark as
++++ ++++ coffee, waits for the sun

to warm its stilled apparatus,
++++ one leg ticking like the hand of a tiny clock
++++ ++++ that can’t get started.

See how the morning glories,
++++ like closed umbrellas glazed
++++ ++++ with rain, open in the cool air

to cobalt cups of heaven
++++ or the idea of heaven, gone
++++ ++++ by noon. The wood thrush

I’ve never seen repeats
++++ last night’s song, trill and lick
++++ ++++ spilling from the flute of its throat

as if it knows a rigorous joy,
++++ as if the world’s consolable.
++++ ++++ Blue sky, clear and widened

like a mind that’s looked into itself and beyond,
++++ is this what we fear, or long for?
++++ ++++ Caught

in the undertow of the linden’s shade,
++++ rumors of something sweet and light
++++ ++++ and never forgotten.

. . . . . . .

I learned about Kathleen Wakefield and her poetry through her friend Patricia Hooper, also featured in these pages. She has worked as a poet-in-the-schools and taught creative writing at the Eastman School of Music and University of Rochester.

Give, Grip and Sway and Silver Birch Press.

More about the Calostoma genus, which includes the irresistibly named and undeniably repugnant “tomato-in-aspic” fungus.