BY STELLA REED
Wild Hyssop
Follow an object
you were given at birth, a toy
horse, for instance, follow the lines
of it becoming something
beloved. Who put it there,
in your hand? What compelled you
to graze it over bed sheets and sand,
through puddles and leaf piles,
to give it a secret name you whispered
into its turned out ears.
I woke, not to rustling leaves,
but a dozen crows shaking snow
from their feathers, a dream
still felt in my body: the ghost
of your leg across my hip.
Wild hyssop will stave off
hunger, turn the tongue blue,
a stain in a time of famine,
a prayer the color of an evening sky.
But it can’t be found in winter.
So now what?
It may as well be gravity, the force
of things we hunger for.
The crows are shaking snow
from their wings onto my tongue,
your leg is salt thrown
over my hip, is phantom
on the back of the horse, blue with winter.
Diapause
Because I have no gods to believe in
I go to the hidden laboratory
where insects are nailed to cardboard
vellum of snakeskin stretches over planks
flower heads float in specimen jars
a pheasant twists on wire bones
Glass flasks hold the improbable scents of butterflies:
Moon-marked skipper
Sandalwood
Blackened blue wing
Chocolate
The light in each windowpane is pebbled
by dust, flecks that settle
in corners where spiders nest
Outside whiptails scatter to the cooling
rays of the remaining trees
bees close the holes in hollowed wood
with feathered sage, apache plume
their hidden pollen shaped to a rune
meaning drought
Funereal duskywing
Heliotrope
Mourning cloak
Sweet pea
Eyes on wings like bullet holes
I’m on my knees when the rains come
Note: the improbable scents of butterflies is from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Stella Reed is the co-author of the AZ-NM Book Award winning, We Are Meant to Carry Water, 2019, from 3: A Taos Press. She is the 2018 winner of the Tusculum Review chapbook contest for Origami, and took 3rd place in the Baltimore Review’s writing contest 2020.
Process Note: Both poems derived from experiences / images that were doorways to these poems: crows shaking snow from their wings and a visit to an odd adobe shack at the Santa Fe Audubon Center called “the lab” filled with many mysterious objects. Annie Dillard’s butterflies seemed perfect for “Diapause” as on the day of the poem’s inspiration, butterflies were abundant.