Holy Heathen Rhapsody
ALSO BY PATTIANN ROGERS
The Grand Array: Writings on Nature, Science, and Spirit
Wayfare
Firekeeper: Selected Poems, Revised and Expanded
Generations
Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981â2001
The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation
A Covenant of Seasons
Eating Bread and Honey
Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems
Geocentric
Splitting and Binding
Legendary Performance
The Tattooed Lady in the Garden
The Expectations of Light
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First published in Penguin Books 2013
Copyright © Pattiann Rogers, 2013
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rogers, Pattiann, 1940â
[Poems. Selections]
Holy Heathen Rhapsody / Pattiann Rogers.
pages cm. â (Penguin Poets)
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-101-62057-1
I. Title.
PS3568.O454H65 2013
811'.54âdc23 2013021082
For my husband, John, my sons, John and Artie, my daughters-in-law, Lisa and Stacey,
and my grandsons, John, Abraham, and Moses, for the warmth and comfort of their presence, home and hearth.
SUMMER'S COMPANY (MULTIPLE UNIVERSES)
WHITEOUT: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF IMPOSSIBILITIES
YOUNG MELCHIOR TAKES THE EVENING AIR
(SPATIAL POSITIONING)
NIGHT AND THE CREATION OF GEOGRAPHY
THE EARTH WITHOUT A SPIRITUAL DIMENSION
THE STORY HUNT, MISSOURI COUNTRYSIDE, JUNE 2010
Some of them are taproots, some
are spreading roots. With the quackgrass,
a sturdy rootstock. I recognize
the maneuvers: buried rhizomes
of beggar weed, long-sleeping seeds
of bitter dock. For canes and reeds,
they are leafy runners.
Their aim is true toward any sun-slit
opening in the multi-storied canopy,
any crack of clay or mortar, through
any ice-broken web across a boulder.
There's one now, a green squeeze through
the splinter seam in that fence post.
Up, outward, and into the deeps,
goosegrass, witch grass, panic
grass, crowfoot grass and nut grass.
And I've felt the keenness of their tactics,
haven't you? Spurs of bristlegrass,
milk thistle or sow thistle, needles, nettles
of sand bur, hooked spines, barbed
awns, bristly tufts. Blood can be proof.
Straining contrivances allâtangled
mats of knotweed and carpetweed,
swaying airy reach of wild vines (morning
glory, tack weed, grape), bold rankness
of burdock and tarweeds, plus the toadrush
love of slushy muck. Even mossy slime
has its loaded armies.
The slip and slither, the feint, twirl,
snatch, catch and hold. Which one
hasn't sought, pushed, striven,
probed, beseeched, bemoaned?
I know these ways, all of them,
angelic, obscene.
1.
Summer, everyday, the flurry-hover
of feeding hermit hummingbirds
and clearwing moths, bee-pause
and butterfly-flutter on shaking petals,
all those tongues lapping, licking,
and probing, the shiver and rub
of furry heads and bodies pushing
into the deepest crevices for nectar,
coming up dripping sugar and powdered
with pollen and off for the next one . . .
2.
Having grown up together, the lesser long-
nosed bat plunges perfectly with its bristly
tongue to sweep the sweetness of the saguaro
blossom. The hawk moth's tongue delves
its full length to reach exactly the far bottom
end of the comet orchid's narrow nectary.
Bumblebees with magic keys are everywhere
opening snapdragons with magic locks.
3.
In the early days of our beginnings,
when our first mothers came upon those colors
in the clearingsâdawning pearl petals,
warm golds and startling scarlets, seductive
violets and dusky pinks growing in among
the monotonous greensâthey were pleased.
Blossom perfumes rose spicy, winsome,
nostalgic with sun-and-moon fragrances.
The people fed, though the flowers were not
food, left them to bloom in the scratched-out
earth. Their seeds, mixed with the others,
were scattered and sown, season after season.
Though fragile, they thrived, all the while
cultivating deep in the bones of the people
the gentleness of care they required,
invoking in the genes of the people
a new longing for beauty.
The loveliest ones they wove
through the hair; the hardiest they placed
on the breasts; the favorites they enclosed
in the folded fingers of the dead.
4.
One of us could be the night pollinator,
flying with fur-covered wings of skin
north from Mexico over the rocky
slopes and seared bajadas of the deserts,
toward the mad musky fragrance
of the organ pipe cactus, its budding
flowers ripe and swelling in the dark.
The other one could be the blossom,
scented and sedate, the lightest shade
of lavender smooth as white waiting
in the night, ravaged, then graced,
pinioned on the tip of the tallest stem.
As if underwater, she floats and shimmies
slowly upward while the sun warms. She pauses
to sink again through the green and deeper
green garden leaves of this single tree,
its edifice all of Eden, earth and paradise,
slender branches bending and flowing
with the morning currents.
Summer lolls, lingers in its own mazes,
a white-limbed poplar, leafstalks, peel
of scented bark. Her bodyâseed wing
or feather down, thread slivers of silkâ
touches each curled lobe and creviced branch
as she passes, slides underside, overside,
along the ridges and furrows. (Is that a tiny
tongue finding the way?) Love is this sun-
holding tree of lapping leaves, delves,
canopies, a multi-tangled cover.
A spasm of breeze, the tree shivers, each leaf
twisting white flash/green shadow. By will
or wind, she moves stemward toward the steady
trunk, following fissure and tangent, rests
finally folded in a woody niche. Who could
know better? Regard the celestial; the sky
is not shelter.
