Dave Bonta

Thalictrum dioicum

Dioicum: separate houses. Here the male & there the female.

Clouds rise from the male plant & dangle yellow weather. From the female plant, ten-fingered hands stretch in all directions.

Without scent or nectar, what flying thing will be their go-between? There’s only the wind.

But this meadow-rue has abandoned the meadow, so it must flower early or the canopy will close & the wind will retire to the treetops.

Quicksilver-weed. The leaves aren’t even open all the way, & already the male flowers are vanishing

into the fertile household of the earth.

Coptis trifolia

White-lipped anthers purse & part. The sturdy styles end in hooks — it’s not enough to be adhesive. Nectar pools in the petals’ yellow spoons above a white dish of sepals, which shatters in the first hard wind.

This blooming is so early & brief, the leaves are better known: like the glossiest strawberry leaves you’ve ever seen growing in the least fertile, most pristine parts of the forest, far from plow & logger, from fire & subdivision, just under the scruffy surface of the world threading a net of gold.

Trillium undulatum

Painted lady, late riser, you rush out of the ground, get pollinated on the fly sometimes before your petals fully open, so that within one day after emergence they are already turning translucent, your pink makeup fading as the light-flooded forest dims to leaf-out. But that’s your true element, isn’t it? The shade. Even unpollinated you are wavy, vague around the edges, ready to let go of all color & get the opposite of a tan. Only a well-timed cold snap can hold your snow.

Prosartes lanuginosa

Their ringing isn’t obvious; you need the ear of an anchorite to find them.

Listen for water tricking under rocks, a black-throated green warbler’s five wheezy notes.

Look beneath creased leaves & zigzag branches for a bell of quiet yellow-green

that flares into a six-pointed star, anthers facing outward around a stout style—

all of which must drop away to swell the bell’s heir, a scarlet clapper.

The soup I had for lunch continues to bubble. Outside there’s fog & rain, I’m sitting straight in my chair reading from a screen & when I hear a gurgle I look out at the drainpipe, unsure for a moment whether the soup is in me or I am in the soup.

I would like a recipe for disorientation, a map for getting lost. It might say, Dissolve each point of reference. Bring to a boil. Take stock.

Incidental planet, Biblical metonym for bitterness, a green anti-fruit filled with air in citrus-like sections & harboring a larva at its core. The oak’s response to a bit of foreign matter is not unlike the oyster’s: wall it off inside a solid tear-drop. Come fall, it turns red but doesn’t rot, lapsing instead into tough brown paper, a manuscript in the round that whelps a wasp.

The first thimble was the tanned hide of an enemy’s thumb. Whisky had yet to be invented, but needles were employed as lances in desperate finger-to-finger combat. Battlefields were so numerous, they were stacked into other battlefields like Russian dolls. Soon, brass was pressed into use, & one armorer began dimpling the surface to ward off smallpox. Prostitutes made their Johns (then still called Jacks) wear thimbles on every finger, because who knew where those hands had been? Meanwhile they were measuring ale with the horns of bulls. Guts were spilling from unprotected abdomens. If you didn’t want a sorceror’s tongue, you couldn’t stare open-mouthed at the pock-marked moon.

My teacher resembles a flightless bird: the sky, to him, is an open book written in a foreign tongue, his enormous eyes are no bigger than his three stomachs & when he sticks his head in the sand, it isn’t to evade the truth but to remember it by being alone with his terrors.