Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire

The Practice of Talking to Plants

T H E P R A C T I C E O F TA L K I N G T O P L A N T S Mama & i, we talk to plants, for we are short girls close to the ground & speech is the golden miracle—; i learn to write while she says honey (making a fire-pouch in the y) to a speckled banana whose existence is energy broth. To limp chrysanthemums she says Come on & drops a Bayer aspirin in; i curve our letters near a cholla after it lent some needles to my leg— We’re not good relaxers, childhood & i, we suffer a leafy need while God is a missing hypotenuse. We’ll not a dreaded dandelion meet before her voice arrives at low violets. In summer, when spicy seeds escape so fine a pepper tree to make sashay for the lahn-ger-ay drawer, we speak to spices they put on Jesus, those poor bright spices staring in the dark . . . He hath numbered every hair on your head, she said, meaning she hath numbered the hairs . . . when we are out with our strangeness in the west—she in her desert, i on a mountain crouching near Lilium parvium with the same amount of frail our mother feels, —it will be quiet for a while but syllables are there: inside a leaf, a syllable, inside a syllable, a door— 2 8 ...