☀ What Sparks Poetry:Brian Teare on "Star Thistle"

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October 19, 2020

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our fourth series, Object Lessons, poets meditate on the magical journey from object to poem via one of their own poems. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.

Star Thistle

Brian Teare
(Centaurea solstitialis)

He died & lamplight
that night brought out against fog its grid of gambits,
each street a perfect winter
dissembled : pure effect,
after that, anything outside
all scumble : marine layer a low hover
that suffered dwelling to disappear into weather, façade
a slow fade into gradient :
his death felt like that :
to unlock & open the front door onto a lost element
looking for purchase, to find a vanishing inside
a home where once there’d been rooms
& no humus
into which to inter his memory, no image :
from fifty miles away, a thousand feet below the field I love,
I tried to remember
how spring undoes the year like a knot :
how winter hay’s flat thin cover turns gold,
gray beneath rain, keeps close to ground
the germinal heat :
how grasses thread up through
the remainder of what sowed them
& help break it down : all spring following his death
I turned in thought to pale green
stems infiltrating the annual
weave of leavings, each seed a knot in the energy net
flung out over the field
so the caught space can blossom :
June 4th I board the ferry in time to see spring end
on Atlas Peak, grasses turning again to seed :
each stem an eidolon of itself, brittle
inflorescences shattering
in my wake, I leave the cabin
each afternoon for the field’s edge
to sit & watch what I can’t see
work the surface : wind, which I’ve never cared for
in particular, cares only for
particulars : this rachis, this spikelet, these lodicules,
nothing too miniature to be seized by a shaking
neither grief nor fear
& far more complete :
days I close my eyes I hear the smallest ocean’s smallest surf break
beneath my feet a pile of gold seeds that rattles the dust :
after fourteen years of living with HIV & the side effects of protease inhibitors,
after persistent, misdiagnosed abdominal pain
turned out to be colon cancer that’d spread to his liver,
after the removal of the tumor & the majority of his colon,
after chemotherapy’s nausea & neuropathy,
after “a perforated abdomen led to a heart attack”
following “three surgeries, and a seizure after the second surgery,”
after “severe peritonitis
and a very bad case of blood poisoning”
that almost killed him,
Reginald died, his final letter
to me ending as always,
“Take good care my friend” : a gesture
I leave the field to hike up the trail
thick with wildflowers : less vetch this year, but plenty of mariposa lilies,
all the flowers bountiful until halfway to the ridge
I enter another field
of a liminal tint, blue-green
stems covered in pale hair, thousands still tender,
but others older, each branch ending in a bright ball of spikes
soon to bloom : yellow star thistle,
non-native invasive,
particularly noxious to grazing animals :
each year the thistle spreads farther down trail :
each year each plant bears
one to a thousand seed heads,
each seed head holding as many as eighty seeds, the life of one plant
easily leaving one hundred behind : knowing nothing I do will help
I pull up a hundred young plants
each time I pass the first field of them :
I grip each stem low to ensure I get
the long ingenious taproot
that even during drought reaches water
& my forearms blister where they’re pricked by lateral spines :
it might be bad mourning
to want the thistle gone
but I go on hating it :
it seems an uncanny design
ensures its slow destruction of an ecosystem :
it chokes out healthy grassland flora, even kills grazing animals
that might control its spread :
uncanny it survives drought & thrives
off wildfire both :
just a pretty plant holistic in its grip of a habitat,
the thistle is not metaphor
& extends into the future
as far as I can see, easily filling the field I love :
at its edge I stand, my skin
a stipple of blisters :
Something startles me where I thought I was safest…
Whitman says,
Now I am terrified
at the Earth, it is that calm and patient
as it undoes itself, undoing that toughens
to give way relentlessly to nothing
but its own propagation : the Earth
undoes itself as each life undoes itself & to what end
is what terrifies me as after the hike
I try with salve to soothe the blisters that deepen & weep weird clear fluid :
the day before Reginald died, we spoke on the phone
but morphine filled his speech
so completely
it was terrible to listen to him, disappearing
even as he said I love you & I echoed him, the last thing
I could bear
before I had to say goodbye
filled with the certainty I’d failed to witness the death of a friend I’d loved :
good mourning accepts transience, sure :
it makes sense in the field I love
where I see next year already
on the stem : sun draws inflorescences taut
& wind separates what’s left into seed & chaff : but
I was raised to believe in
a personal God attending a death
whose final horizon is eternity, an ideal persistent
as the star thistle seeds carried to California by contaminated feed in the 1850s,
whose progeny covers twelve to fifteen million acres currently :
what chemistry!
as Whitman would say
it is that calm and patient :
& though the thistle isn’t metaphor
I find myself kneeling,
weeding the lowest field again, & I become everything
about root giving up ground, the groan it grudges as it eases up, out,
the subtle scent of the flower
that when eaten by horses causes brain lesions
& mucosal mouth ulcers that lead to eventual death by starvation & dehydration
& when eaten by bees makes exceptional honey, heavily fragrant
& strangely dark, almost grey :
two weeks before we spoke, Reginald in the hospital wrote his last poem,
“God-With-Us,” ending it
…How I want
to believe. (a pearl, an irritant). :
it’s one thing to want to believe, to live by building a mind on the fault
between faith & doubt :
it’s another to believe the longing for belief
an attack, a distrust of immersion in the material given us as habit & habitat,
no possible rush of friendship for stones, grasses & humus,
as if the human were over
& the wild deer in us were released at last
at dusk to disappear into the stand of manzanita far across the field I love :
if we die to become nothing but matter so that Being itself might continue, grounded
by ground itself,
such a sweet thing out of such corruptions!,
who wouldn’t wish to linger in the material world
that won’t spare me or let me hold a living hand to him :
all spring I’ll return
to bring grief to the field, always
one root
I can’t pull out
entire : “as above,
so below” :
from star down to thistle
it’s all the same : still firm in the ground,
today it breaks in my hand,
bad mourning that this summer flowers
the life only destruction makes possible.
Reginald Shepherd
April 10, 1963—September 10, 2008

from the book COMPANION GRASSES / Omnidawn

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Forward

What Sparks Poetry:
Brian Teare on "Star Thistle"
"What is a weed in one cultural context is medicine or food in another; what is invasive in one ecosystem is native to another; and plants, like matter, as William James would wisely say, have no ideals. What I brought to the Star Thistle was what Adam Phillips in his marvelous book Darwin’s Worms would call the problem of grieving in a secular age."

READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

Joy Harjo on a Canon of Indigenous Poems

"This Anthology reframes American Poetry to include Indigenous Poetry as necessary to American Poetry....We are poets, we have accomplished poets, and we had poets long before there was an entity called America. We were here, we are here, we didn’t disappear or die; but, we are living voices and we are poets."

viaCHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS

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