Here she comes with her face to be kissed. Here she comes
lugging two plastic sacks looped over her arms and stuffed
with fresh shoots. It's barely dawn. She's been out
for an hour already, digging up what she can save
before developers raze the day's lot sites and set
woodpiles ablaze. That's their plan for the ninety-plus acres.
She squats in the sun to show me wild phlox
in pink-running-to-blue, rue anemone, masses
of colt's foot, wild ginger, blood root and may-
apples, bracken and fiddlehead fern — ferns being not
spring ephemerals, per se, but imperiled by road-graders
come to shave the shaded slopes where they grow.
Once I held her in a snow cover of sheets. Wind beat
the world, while we listened. Her back was a sail
unfurling. She wanted me to touch stitches there,
little scabs, where doctors had sliced the sick cells
and cauterized her skin for safety's sake.
Now her hands are spotted by briars, bubbles of blood
daubed in brown. She's got burrs in her red hair.
Both sleeves are torn. She kneels as the sunlight
cuts through pine needles above us, casting a grid
like the plats the surveyors use. It's the irony
of every cell: that it divides to multiply.
This way the greedy have bought up the land
behind ours to parcel for resale at fifty-
fold what they paid weeks ago.
It's race to outrun their gas cans and matches,
to line the path to our creek with transplants
of spice bush, yellow fawn-lily, to set aside space
in the garden for the frail. She adjusts the map
she's drawn of the tumbling woods — where each
flower and fern come from, under what tree, beside
which ridge. Dysfunctional junctional nevus :
a name like a bad joke for the growth on her skin,
pigment too pale for much sunlight. Drooping trillium ,
she says, handing me a cluster of roots, unfolding leaves —
rare around here. How delicate, a trillium,
whose oils are food for ants, whose sessile leaves are
palm-sized, tripartite. They spread a shadow over
each stem's fragile one bloom, white in most cases,
though this one's maroon. This makes it rarer.
It hangs like a red bell safe from the sun. It bends
like our necks bend, not in grief, not prayer,
as we work with our backs to the trees, as they burn.
lugging two plastic sacks looped over her arms and stuffed
with fresh shoots. It's barely dawn. She's been out
for an hour already, digging up what she can save
before developers raze the day's lot sites and set
woodpiles ablaze. That's their plan for the ninety-plus acres.
She squats in the sun to show me wild phlox
in pink-running-to-blue, rue anemone, masses
of colt's foot, wild ginger, blood root and may-
apples, bracken and fiddlehead fern — ferns being not
spring ephemerals, per se, but imperiled by road-graders
come to shave the shaded slopes where they grow.
Once I held her in a snow cover of sheets. Wind beat
the world, while we listened. Her back was a sail
unfurling. She wanted me to touch stitches there,
little scabs, where doctors had sliced the sick cells
and cauterized her skin for safety's sake.
Now her hands are spotted by briars, bubbles of blood
daubed in brown. She's got burrs in her red hair.
Both sleeves are torn. She kneels as the sunlight
cuts through pine needles above us, casting a grid
like the plats the surveyors use. It's the irony
of every cell: that it divides to multiply.
This way the greedy have bought up the land
behind ours to parcel for resale at fifty-
fold what they paid weeks ago.
It's race to outrun their gas cans and matches,
to line the path to our creek with transplants
of spice bush, yellow fawn-lily, to set aside space
in the garden for the frail. She adjusts the map
she's drawn of the tumbling woods — where each
flower and fern come from, under what tree, beside
which ridge. Dysfunctional junctional nevus :
a name like a bad joke for the growth on her skin,
pigment too pale for much sunlight. Drooping trillium ,
she says, handing me a cluster of roots, unfolding leaves —
rare around here. How delicate, a trillium,
whose oils are food for ants, whose sessile leaves are
palm-sized, tripartite. They spread a shadow over
each stem's fragile one bloom, white in most cases,
though this one's maroon. This makes it rarer.
It hangs like a red bell safe from the sun. It bends
like our necks bend, not in grief, not prayer,
as we work with our backs to the trees, as they burn.