Outdoor Living 


We make of nature another room.
A big room if we have a big space, 
an ordinary room if the space is small. 
Make it comfortable, decorate a little
Make a place to sit. A place to eat. 
A place to cook, conditions permitting, 
The sun shining, the breezes light –
All this works best if the weather is right
Here’s a clue, for me and you – 
Wait for the sun to warm things up
Warm is desirable for living outdoors
Warm is “natural,” room temperature outdoors
Come on out (or in?)
Look, we have company: It’s the Plant Family!
They come in uninvited
Work with them
We can’t beat them even if we tried
We want to make a difference
Something beautiful will grow up between us
See? What did I just say?
It’s starting, we can’t escape it
We too are made of earth
We want to live outdoors
Pass the wine, pick the strawberries
Drop your fig leaf, honey, 
You have dirt beneath your fingernails. 





Parsing of Names


Covered in a sticky substance
You get stigma on your nose

Petals attract insects
Be more bee-like
Follow the guidelines

The style varies in length
I’ll say

The ovary will become the fruit
How like life

The ovule is like the egg
But it wants to be a seed

The receptacle hugs the stem
Throw something in there
Pull a strawberry out

Down below is the nectary, 
Sugar, sugar bowl for insects

Sepals do security
Hey, bud, get growing 

Filament: this is the stalk of the author — 
No — “anther”!

And the anther is? 
Long.

Short answer: anther, pollen sacs, insect, stigma (here or somewhere else in town: no one can make a rule for insects), ovule, fertilization.

Bottom line? 
Yes, there are female parts: stigma, style, ovary, ovule; known collectively as the carpel
And male parts: filament, anther, together called stamen. 
As in most groups, there are more of the females. 

Please click to print for children.





Human Bee-ing


Flowers are the sex organs 
Of hot momma nature.
We all love the colors, the shapes,
The delicate constructions. 
They bring us together.

Do not ask what makes 
that deep, persistent buzz
that hovers above Zouave jackets and bell-flared trousers,
transparent angel wings extended,  
and wiggles its butt between stamen and pistil.
It’s us.





The Garden Czar


A new campaign, a new front. 
I am moving peoples, tribes. Colonies. 
I bid them pick up all that they own and journey to the land 
which I have prepared for them, or will, 
when I have finished dumping them by the roots into a plastic pail, 
and take up my oversized hand trowel for the next thrust in world building.
I am, at times, a careless God. 
Still, my people will long remember the adventures of this day
and speak of them for generations to come. 
(Every spring, I am confident, is a new generation.)
I am the Czarist factotum who tells Tevye and his village to clear out by Friday: 
Orders from the top. 
Of course I am also the top. 





The Scripture of Nature


Some nonchalant immortal turns the page to autumn
On cue, sweet day slips off her shawl, growing warm, sultry, reminiscent 
The husband walks the garden in shirtsleeves, thinking of nothing
Everything is semi-shade now, the sun at half-mast
The Morning Glory explores its name
Blooms clinging to the house like a band of nervous orphans
Blood-purple asters peak, already penciling in their winter vacation 
(Somewhere you won’t see them)
The toad lilies not yet ready to change their spots
A single cricket keeps up a cracked tenor solo — 
      a late phase song: he’s studied all the great romantics
Give him a few more degrees of autumn’s comeback love 
And he makes up with the universe: gotta sing! gotta sing!
High up in the gathering season a squirrel beeps his barking little horn
squawking at the cat, black and disinterested, who plays possum with time
And so it is written 
That a walk in a garden is a prayer routine
Natural places are “thought sinks”:
Emotion sinks, agitation sinks. 
They absorb the world’s disturbances.

Walking on the equipoise of the year,
We tread like garden monks of peerless devotion, 
But who invited that tacky squirrel?




The Name of the Flower


Anemone. It’s the name that speaks to me, 
The name that is its own poem.
When all else fails, a single green plant begins to flower
Pink, daisy-shaped, soft fleshy ears around a clock face of yellow
Coming so late; a message from another world 
Buds round and puffy before they open. 
With such buds you know what is coming
You wait, like a lover, for the sensuous unfolding,
A prolonged anticipation of the moment.
Do not (a voice tells me) make love to a flower.

But it’s timing, as in music, as in love, that lands the punch. 
September: the turn in the year,
The turn in the poem of earth.

Not so showy as some,
They keep their heads down
No one calls them “cheerful, sun-loving”
But deep-feeling, hearty, September’s half-light loving
They smile, contemplatively
They soak up thoughts too deep for words.




Consider the Bee


Consider the honeybee. 
How in summer you never see one unmoving 
Pollinating the hours in and out of flowers
Now, chilling, they seem to stick to the flower head
As if dead, or frozen, or honey-stuck to the beloved
Soaking up sun, or waiting for it
Soaking up the scent, or nectar of the bloom
Or the fruit and flower, the air itself, the hour, the mind of summer 
Wherever a bee may hold such thoughts 

So too with us at harvest time
Leaves wheel their colors against a depthless sky. 
Apple orchards and rows of black and blue berries the color of dusk

Inhale the bloom, drink in the fruit with your long, pointy eyes,
The lenses of the brain.