mood: stuck | drinking: lemonade
I’m borrowing a poem from Elizabeth Bradfield today, just for you…
Nonnative Invasive
Lupine, gentian, chocolate lily. We’ve been
naming, been exclaiming, been looking up
in our guidebooks the alpine flowers. But
look at these! Amy says, pointing
to bright dandelion at trail edge, heads
like airplane aisle lights. How pretty! Don’t you
want to pick bunches and bunches and bring them
home? A swell of roadside by my house
yellows with them now, excessive petals
turning to excessive seed. Curbside,
I’m glad they are not lawn. But they’ll invade
this meadow, push out with brash cheer
forget-me-not and wooly lousewort. I want
to reconcile them, but I can’t. I hiked up
to see anemones and saxifrage, to get away
from landscaping and what landscaping
weeds out. I think of how they arrived, seeds
embedded in boot-dirt, stuck to our socks and the fur
of our dogs. Praise their tenacity, says Amy.
But she’s just arguing a point. None of us
is glad they’ve hitched a ride up here.
None of us knows how to accept
the way love changes what it’s drawn to
—smudging self across what’s seen—
when what thrilled us first was difference.
-Lo, pondering the inevitability of smudges.
LaDonnaWitmer 