Forage

Three summers now she’s managed to return,
this year with a fawn so small a hawk could
carry it off, but the fawn is faster than she is,
springs like a toy and goes invisible in the dapple
of not yet blooming goldenrod. Perhaps
it’s a point of pride among the hunters
not to down a thing already wounded, dragging
the limp back leg like a sack of spoons,
but her fawn will one day be fair game.
What the hunters didn’t take, a stag
must have mounted easily as the fleet
moved effortlessly off. The neighbors call her
“Gimpy,” and she’s learned to swallow
the dregs of their pity as she drags across
the treated lawns, forgets to swivel an ear
at the sound of voices, shoes, doors.
Hunger trumps fear when the great shadow
of the stag is gone, so she takes what others
of her kind will not touch, even in the dead
of winter, the pans of crumb and peel,
all the summer somewhere leavings
humans think she wants. They also think
she loves her little one. But the fawn
is neither company nor joy to her, simply
something ravenous that arrived, doubled
her danger, doubled her need
to follow the smell of smoke.  

Hag-Taper

No one wishes to claim a weed — Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers

Mid July and it’s driven itself skyward in mere
weeks. Phallic I would have said, eager as it seems
to arrow the expanse, assert its single self above
the fountains of bee balm, and not at all happy
about the milkweed gaining on it as the summer
ripens. The old field guide comments are rich,
that children hurl the dried stalks as javelins
because they sail straight and far. I send my sister
a portrait of it, the way it insists, foregrounded,
that it’s taller than anything else in the frame.
The Europeans called it velvet plant
for the wide tongues of its leaves covered
in yellow fur. Rose says it loves drought
and rock, and flowers only in its second year.
If I return here another twenty summers,
I will never know all these guests, but I learn
one or two a year, and forget in winter, the way
we forgot lives burned out in the dark tunnel
of the plague year, and then found ourselves
trying to recall, over lunch, if or when so and so
died, because there were so many we hadn’t
seen, like this, aiming skyward in the light,
half bloomed, half stalk covered in fine hairs,
pale veins fanning through the leaves, all of it,
up close, calling attention to a softness you’ll
reach to touch before you remember the spikes.
Things aren’t so bad now that I’d need to know
how to dry and dip the stalk in tallow as the Greeks
did for funeral torches, but I don’t forget
how last summer when the deer passed,
browsing along the deck, they were not,
as they’d been in the years before, simple
pleasures of the land cavorting with their young,
but walking freezers of provisions, keepers
of the tallow we’d need to dip these stalks
and light to accompany our dead to the edge
of what we own. The weed, says Rose,
is good for many ills, wet cough, wrenched
joints, earache. Is he still alive? asks the young
poet of an old one he never particularly admired.
Yes, barely, I answer, though the wick of him
has been lit so long in me, it doesn’t matter
if the body still lies in a room across town.
What crosses the field as heat or seed
is ever food and cruelty, gift and theft,
balm all the way down to the ground.