Most flower poems pick one name and trust it. Dave Bonta's "Wild Geranium" does the opposite. Under its Latin heading, *Geranium maculatum*, it piles up eight folk names (Alum Bloom, Chocolate Flower, Old Maid's Nightcap, Cranesbill, Crowfoot, Sailor's Knot, Rockweed, Shameface) and lets each one introduce a small observation. The result is a portrait of one plant built from the different ways people have tried to say what it is. Midway through, the poem loses patience with all of them: "what fool / invented these names?"
The order of those observations is worth noticing. The poem begins with the flower, addressed as "you of the shocking / blue pollen," then drops to the root, "once used / as a styptic," then moves on to the fruit. From there it follows the seedpod as it "burst[s] open / expelling the seeds," and finally the seed itself. By the time Rockweed arrives, a seed is "pulling itself into / a likely crevasse," and the plant has traveled from bloom to ground. The last name, Shameface, brings us back to a flower: "a flush beloved / of the bees." So the poem ends where it began, with the plant in bloom. It reads as a cycle more than a list.
The imagery is the most striking thing here, and much of it is animal. The fruit is "like / the head of a bird," the seeds have "a tail / that curls & straightens," and the verbs are active ones: bursting, expelling, curls, straightens, pulling. The geranium behaves like a small creature, and the seed that hauls itself into a crack seems to act with purpose. The word "likely" adds quiet humor, since it takes the seed's point of view, as if the seed were house-hunting. "Crevasse," a glacier-sized word for a tiny gap, shrinks the reader down to the seed's scale.
Meanwhile, the names are mostly human. An old maid, a sailor and a shamefaced person all appear, and none of them has much to do with the plant's own business of making pollen, firing seeds and finding soil. Sometimes a name and its caption fit neatly, as with Cranesbill and the bird-headed fruit. Elsewhere the connection is left for the reader to guess. Sailor's Knot might hint at the curling seed-tail, and Old Maid's Nightcap at the shape of the fruit, but the poem never says so. That gap is where the skepticism comes from. The names feel like human guesses laid over something that is already doing fine without them.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only short lines of two to four stresses that stop and start like quick glances. In the middle, hard *k* sounds build up: Cranesbill, Crowfoot, crevasse, curls. They echo "shocking" and "styptic" earlier and give the seed-flinging section a snapping, percussive feel. The closing line is softer: "a flush beloved of the bees," full of *f*, *l*, *b* and *s*. After all the bursting, the poem ends on a gentle sound and a gentle image.
That ending also answers the angry question. Shameface is the one name that seems to get something right: it catches the blush of the petals, and the poem then turns to the bees, who care nothing for names and are drawn to the color anyway. The poem is hard on naming, since it sneers at the namers, but it is also built entirely from their names. Each name opens a door into real looking, and without Cranesbill we might never picture the bird's head. The poem seems to say that names are clumsy but still worth keeping, because they preserve what people noticed.
This is why the poem is worth reading closely. In under fifty lines it teaches a way of paying attention: look at the root, the fruit and the seed as well as the pretty flower, and be a little suspicious of labels. It does this lightly, with a joke at its own expense, and it leaves the last word to the bees.