Poison DNA and English Ivy (on Hedera Helix)

In venerated halls, you spill yourself over stone -

drape fences,

frame shuttered eyes,

reach steeples alive with swinging bells.

We invite the

haughty appetite

which swallows institution and home, an insulated robe to cover cracks

with green facade.

 

Across an ocean,

where once the red cedar reached hard for sky,

you wind your grey raised vines, sprout emerald stars, and clutch the sacred totem bark

with a thousand white-glued hands -

a shallow root.

Your seeds spread wide in ruffled, down aprons

Of yellow warbler and mistle thrush,

pregnant with purple rowan and hawthorn berry,

bleeding sprigs against the hallowed snow.

You harbor white flies and mealybugs

that feed, with aphids - tiny vampires on the vein - draining bitter sap.

The gardener kneels on cushioned mat,

gloved hands cutting twigs that spring

from your veiled floor;

small trees that peak up by inches,

shorn at the base as soon as

they rise;

brown stalks wary against the green night.

Thirty feet a year

you curl each stalwart trunk,

seep poison deep inside grand fir and canyon oak:

proud bodies of a Native Earth.

Their cross-hatched tails look down at your insistent climb,

curved beaks of eagles made drunk with salted tears.

Keats whispers

sweet nothings to death and places you, a crown upon our heads;

an English poet’s ode, dreaming on a library cot

of grey-teethed villains.

Snails leave us silvery trails on your foliage,

a map;

and winged looper moths, in yellow and black,

make skeletons out of your hands -

but you are not deterred.

 

Where once we watched you

swallow fields

of cascara and maple -

fire on our backs for lack of shade -

we now pull you out

at the root

by handfuls,

though our fingers scar and blister.

We plant juniper,

anoint our heads with white cedar -

and persist,

the canyon mists alive

with ancient eyes.