Sarah Hannah
Inflorescence
How can you, who dosed herself
With death so many times, be terrified
Of dying? I try singing folk songs: “Greensleeves,”
“Scarborough Fair,” read our favorite
song from Cymbeline: “Fear No more,”
but nothing stops it: Mum, help, Mum.
Can you see her now, somehow, your rotund
English mother, brisket, chicken fat, and bustle,
A sparkling ruby brooch pinned to her warm wide
Breast as she slices fried egg pancakes into soup
In some ideal Jewish kitchen floating just above my head,
Or, my lady, do you call to me?
We’re paced out like this garage-sale Persian rug
Beneath the rented hospital bed and commode
(No longer any use). Your fists strike sheets.
There’s nothing I can do.
All around us: flowers.
Costly exotics jetted post-haste from La Jolla,
Genetically mastered for astonishment
Through excess: Double Boulevardia,
Triple Gardenia, nursed in hothouses,
Delivered to the door in polystyrene boxes.
Kind of ridiculous, you said, when you could speak.
Canterbury Bells your former painting student
Drove down one day from Maine,
In a graceful vase of milky green. How we
Gasped over those, tolling, pale blue, color
Of the liquid morphine.
And the handpicked bunch my friend
Brought from her garden in Somerville,
Clutched in tin foil: Meadow Rue,
Celandine, waving in the air conditioner’s
Tempered breeze. They won’t last the week.
Mum?
I flip through Webster’s Dictionary.
There are names for how they show themselves—
Types. Patterns of arrangement.
Such things, I reckon, do not die. I read:
Raceme, umbel, corymb, cyme.
You quiet, close your eyes.
Between the rattle and the oxygen machine:
Spikelet, spadix, strobile.
After leaf and petal fall,
Up and down the graying bones,
The innate structures of the flowers.
You can see them when the fripperies are gone:
How their blooming plans itself:
Queen Anne—Compound umbel,
Exponential. Williams saw her sweep
Entire fields in her lacy whites, coup
After coup of radial symmetry.
By October she’ll close and stiffen, dun.
Mum?
I can’t tell you where you’re going,
And I won’t make up some story.
Raceme, umbel, corymb, cyme—
Mum, what’s this?
I clasp your wrists.
Not now, just you and me, this room?
Corymb, cyme—capitulum?
Tread Softly (Cnidoscolus stimulosus)
Hell, this is a field without end,
Wider than a gate, athrum with
Insect wing and squawk. I might as well
Go swim in flame, but I can’t swim,
So I’ll just walk: nettle, bramble,
Spike, and blame, not a single quenching
Drop of dew. Not a field—a ravine—
I mean a raving: You. And I’m
On double shift: daughter, nurse,
In double oxymoron: home, hospice.
Some have said it’s not worth saving,
This tiny family of Spurge: we two.
The hooks go in, the rash is swift, and
There’s no poultice, only spur and spurned.
Even the milk sap burns. I’ve the urge to turn
And quit, but there’s simply no one else to do it;
No one could or would—tread softly, that is—
Open the hand and step back in,
Knowing what I know.
Twinflower (Linnaea borealis)
Linnaeus knew there should be at least two names for everything.
All that talk of infinite variety
Should be realized in talk. Take Linnaea borealis. He knew
You cannot know a thing until you know it
Twice, at the very least.
Wandering through the north, combing Lapland in 1732
For an ostensibly official purpose,
He saw it: flower, vine, a pair of blooms downturning on narrow stem.
He plucked it, knew it simply,
And from then on he bore it proudly in his buttonhole for portraits,
Declaring it his namesake
(Of North and of himself), elaborating thus:
“A little northern plant, long overlooked, depressed, abject, flowering early.”