In Poland, the land takes over everything,
unrelenting in its mission to regenerate
after the war. Fields overrun sidewalks,
train stations, street corners. Purple
flowers spill from the open windows of houses.
Queen Anne’s lace reigns supreme in parking
lots. Even the dead in cemeteries are affected:
no neatly trimmed grass here but waves upon
waves of wild flowers. Blue lupine, saffron,
black-eyed Susan, chicory. The dead love
this wildness growing above their bones.
“Tak, tak,” they whisper in the hush of the wind
that scatters the soft gossamer of dandelions
into the waiting air. “Yes, yes, take over this place
that was once lost. Cover it in so much color
even the clouds, who’ve seen everything,
won’t know where death lived for so long.”
And who can argue with the dead? Not their
thin ghosts or unborn progeny. Not their
exile who returns after the war, stands
bewildered at their graves, hip-deep
in blue-eyed grass, trying to decipher names
that already belong to the earth.
After the War: Purple Flowers Spilling from the Windows, Linda Nemec Foster
after William Carlos Williams’s “Queen-Anne’s-Lace”
Remote purple lays claim to stem,
beside routine stripes of green and brown.
Dark as a patch of shade
in the marsh across the path
that the neighborhood kids and I,
were forbidden to pass. It is
that hue that overtakes,
the marsh that sucks in boots
and offers up skunk cabbage and cattails.
Nests here and overhead. Who named this plant—
also called bog onion, brown dragon, Indian turnip, wake robin,
Arisaema triphyllum—
and who told me I cannot name. But
his purple—all shadow, all remote and not-remote,
all question marks,
craving. Yes?
This herbaceous perennial, growing from corm
vertical and swollen as it is underground.
Even in late summer, it is not nothing, William
(or Jack),
turning from purple to red before his scattering.
Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Kimiko Hahn
as in purpose; the purple of the hillside
enrolled me in its misery, mysterious mist
emanating.
When it was over the daydescended in the form of a star, ours,
which is to say the dark returned
which is to say a measure of darkness inter
posed between and among the sources
the lights twinkling against a moon.
This was a landscape longed for, lost.
Long as a verb—to increase in length
of days, of nights, of neither.
Still the purple stain, floral embellishment,
ingrains itself, inhabits banished gardens.
Another End, Bin Ramke
