Crownbeard (Verbesina alternifolia) has been plentiful at the garden edge for years. It is also called yellow ironweed and yellow wing stem. This year it has grown beyond expectations, not only on the north edge,
but along the entire western edge of the garden beyond the meadow almost reaching to the Frank Lloyd Wright
grounds.
It is in the daisy family (Asteraceae) with a scruffy flower which looks better from afar than up close.
The poem is longer than my usual gifts. Read it slowly
when time is not an issue.
VERBESINA OCCIDENTALIS
Dark does not fall: it rises from the soil,
seeping along the flattened grass
of the dim path and flowing
up trees already black,
night's conduits, forked
darkening against the retreating light,
while below them in the field the crownbeard
on its winged stem makes a last effort,
waggling its two or three
yellow rays, lifting
its small cluster of disc petals
in imitation of the sun—though
its leaves have gone quiet already,
and the pollinators sleep their insect sleep.
*
Sleep is just a way to talk about what happens
in the dark, what the cells do, what
color green is, when no light shines on it.
The crownbeard holds still now, nothing moves
under the streetlights in the ramifying subdivisions.
Wings close, and petals. Eyes
see nothing that is not inward and radical.
There are boundaries, such as where stem
becomes root, and where the taproot probes
among stones, and we may travel them,
through capillaries and waterways and geographies
of decomposition. Underground is like aboveground
inverted, a reflection of sorts, uncertain
and hopeful as seedheads at seedtime.
*
Seedtime is the wind, and seeds
quiver in their bracts, as brittle
as moths are, and as dry, as poised,
as these winged stems, which still lean
to the light. One good shake
and they scatter down the grasses
and lodge: while the rains come, and long hours
of dark and cold, while they parse
moonlight and sunlight, and know already
that the root comes first and follows water
down the kingdoms of soil, then a tendril
and the precursors of leaves, leaf, branch and crown.
I hold some in my palm: each husk ribbed and shaped
like a vase, like the word promise in their language.
*
In their language, grow is a conversation among cells,
why, thank you, here's the sun! you go first,
yes, you, I this way and in this green vein
upward, and here's sap, sweet and mineral . . .
Like banners held to our view
by attending angels, their pronouncements
unfurl and flutter through the daylight,
and all night they hum. The point being seed
and more seed, up there where their lures dangle;
a few long, bright yellow petals, no need
for more when bees enough roam the flowerets,
when even one person has leaned closer, as if to listen
and instead been sounded, like a drum
struck and reverberating through the field and further.
*
And further afield, along trails
mapping the wood, waysides, and how many lives
did I pass through and never know its name?
By hearsay and looking, in a book, I found
a paradise of leaves, opposite and ovate,
that curious "tissue decurrent on the stem,"
the loose corymbs, taxonomies of desire
in a right name, a promise
of knowledge and belonging, as in "my flower,"
"my field," and so on, until "our flower,"
our dominion. That much was in my gift—a sprig,
it's true. While the flowers, which know all about
belonging, heeded the imperatives of light and wind,
water calling to them: Verbesina, little word.
*
Word, made dicotyledon and vascular,
one-stemmed perennial aster, of the family
Asteraceae: not so much star as a constellation
of particulars, a coming-together that was years
in the making. I saw crownbeard growing,
yellow crownbeard, Southern crownbeard,
here, in an old field reverting to wood.
Birds fidgeted in the stands. Deer
crashed through the stiff, ribbed stems
and left them bruised and flattened. People
and their dogs passed through, Linnaeus
and his descendants were among the familiars.
We left traces in the air, on the grass
and track, a faint phosphorescence in the dark.
© Maura High
Nov 2011–Jan 2012
