Flora Americana

I. Natives

They rolled up his lawn, just a sad shag rug. With mattock and machete, with Spanish when those failed, a man attacked the hedge. Before the neighbor’s azaleas could bloom into ballgowns or bishops’ robes––before I could say sunset hung on a bush to dry––

men gouged them out. In the bare dirt, seeds long dormant staked their claim to all a weed demands: a scabby patch of ground that someone left “disturbed.” And the earth brought forth vegetation,plants yielding seed according to their own kinds.

And there was evening and there was morning,a third day. And a fourth. And the landscaper? No matter. From each unwanted seed, a rude reminder of America’s lost Eden. Rewilders, who holds claim to this earth? Am I not animal enough?

Beggar’s-tick, you pencil-mark my clothes with seeds whenever I approach, ready to yank you up by the root––but next door you host a butterfly. Tell me, were those the underwing eyespots of an American painted lady I just saw?

Weed, may I call you wildflower?

II. Invaders

Dandelion, I beg your pardon. You were here first. No? You’re an immigrant like the rest of us? You’ve made yourself at home, root sent so deep, you never meet a gardener who digs up enough to halt your spread. What palace grounds of the Old World did you not invade?

Only in the court of the wind do you bow, its empire the only one vaster than yours. Next to you, Pissabed, the sun grows dull. Devil’s Milk Pail, Lion Tooth, shake your clock awake. Shake it to death. Seed-cloud a Pilgrim pressed in a copy, well-thumbed, of Gerard’s Herball,

your down crossed the Atlantic in the foolhardy trunk of a Pilgrim–– my husband’s ancestor, perhaps. The Lincolnshire clay on his boots would have smuggled more. Tell me, commoner, how you stowed away in livestock fodder, on ballast cobble.

III. A Recipe

Off with their heads! How much per flower did Mother pay us to pick the yard clean? At the playground, we plucked more, then counted our wealth in nickels. She sweetened, soured, steeped, and strained. In a dark corner of the laundry room, a crock huddled under a cloth. Life stank of death. Water turned to wine––or at least to beer.

For, if the recipe came from Grandmother–– as my sister claims––who passed it down to her? Who left the Old Country with the scraps they owned of the nineteenth century? For, to perfect a “dandelion wine,” the English would lay it down for half a year. But the Irish wait six months for a drink? They drained their “dandelion beer”

after a week––just as the recipe from Grandma Brennan said: just long enough for water to turn to alcohol. In Mother’s scuffed recipe box, an heirloom hid from a family with so few. Left: a quilt pieced from slivers of neckties, nothing too narrow to be reused, the silk in shatters. A plump Victorian Bible,

the page crowded with births and deaths fading to make room for more. The black shoe-buttons of Grandpa’s rosary, crucifix thumbed until God became twig. Grandma’s treadle sewing machine–– how many times cross-country had it sewn? And a scatter of sovereigns, compounding daily:

Dandelion, we inherited you.