Helleborine

A soundtrack of sultry engines

and gnashing blades. Loggers

are warping my neighbor’s woodlot

to bloody his eager bank account

with tire ruts through the wetlands

and slaughter of nesting songbirds.

But my perennial plots retort

with clustered stalks of orchis,

a gift from an unknown source

windblown about the cosmos.

Alien, epipactis helleborine

welcomes me into the garden

with a sudden flurry of blossoms.

Tough ribbed leaves clutching the stem.

Green-tint flowers shaded purple,

hearty lip thrust forward, a sac

with pointed tip underslung.

I hadn’t noticed the stalks growing,

although they must have required

days or weeks of nourishment

to rise from the bottom of things

and crown themselves in mottled shade.

As I kneel before their glory

a double-rigged truckload of rubble

hacked from the living white pine

lumbers along the road and sneers

its lonesome diesel sneer,

mocking with carbon emissions

the defeat of entire forests.

But I’ve come to these flowers

as one returned from a distant star

to linger for a final close-up.

The helleborine looks aloof

yet available, tough but frail

like a character in film noir.

Its aroma defies my sense of smell

with subtleties I can’t parse

from the larger photosynthesis.     

So never pick an orchid. Tiny

but finely sculpted blossoms

climb their stalks and peer at me

with that floral curiosity

that feels so much like a feeling

crawling right over me, groping

for some grave yet passionate reply.

Stokes Aster

At Morningstar in August

potted perennials have strewn

roots beyond their containers

and clutch at burlap, other plants,

or the weedy ground below.

I browse among trees grown so tall

still in their large plastic pots

you’d need a crane to move them.

Honeybees simper in flowers,

wallowing in sweets. Their lives,

compromised by pesticides, fungus,

and long dull winters, seem useful

but too monastic to excite me

into fits of figurative language.

They’re working only a few yards

from their hives, white cubes propped

on legs above the reach of dogs—

three goldens and an aging mutt—

that follow me step by step

through the aisles of straining flowers.

Stokes aster stops me. Its flowers

attain a shimmering deep blue

that locks my gaze and stuns me.

I could grow old watching these blossoms

bask in their private glory,

but the dogs nudge me along

to the orchard where brown pears ripen

like swollen leather knuckles

in a dazzle of ranting bees.

Somersville Mill Pond

This is the second of two poems about Somersville, Connecticut, a village a few miles from where I lived as a child.

Scales of whitewashed asphalt

shingle the worker tenements

shading a few gray scabs of snow.

Wandering to the mill pond where

I fished half a century ago

I feel my tracks smack the mud

with a tiny inaudible lisp.

The silver wind on the water

hacks long herringbones of wave.

It’s too cold to stand here staring

at places too shy to resist the wry

nostalgia I doubt more than death.

The mill burned two years ago.

A cage of girders remains where

the more modern building stood.

Brick walls of the older complex

retain something Classical,

impersonal with great age.

I’d like to prowl along the edge

of the pond to find that distant view

of the Hubbard farm. I admired it

for the litter of farm equipment

that ornamented the barnyard

with Farmall red, John Deere green,

and rust in a hundred subtle hues.

I’d walk all the way to the bridge

where the town constable chased

four drunk teenagers who crashed

into the steel girders and burned

to death, one of them his son.

No one had the heart to concoct

the usual ghost story, and now

it’s too late, a modern concrete bridge

replacing the aged truss-work.

Retracing my tracks to the car

I’m sure the wind will remember

sculpting around me. It’ll leave

a hole in the atmosphere

that will shimmer in my absence

like the ghosts of those teenagers

scarred into the mid-spring dark.