The Best American Poetry

With the Sun [by Mary Gilliland]

Want more shade? Want more sun? A plant demonstrates its answers—via height or sturdiness or angle of inclination. About the spring ephemerals, though, there’s no need to worry the question. They emerge when trees are bare of leaves.

The thing about bulbs: they are easy to plant and, when conditions optimize for new growth—the slant of sunlight in the spring, its rains—their green shoots rise, “conspiring with the sun,” then bloom year after year—and multiply. Descendants of my mother-in-law’s handful of Narcissus poeticus, the poet’s narcissus aka pheasant’s eye, number in the thousands all over not only our land but friends’ gardens all over town. 

In September and October after a day of contact-intensive teaching, I would spend an hour or two planting yet more bulbs, recovering some of the energy expended on one-to-ones with college students. Gardening helped me keep faith with poetry until in my late thirties I heard about places that give writers residencies. Were the poems penned in my tired off hours worth pursuing? Seems so. The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown invited me for 7 months. I put my job on the line. I had to skip my annual Cornell ritual of enlarging John Keats’ “To Autumn” on the copier at the fall equinox and taping his poem to my office door for the season.

Once the ephemerals have bloomed and their foliage finishes doing its thing, their above-ground parts disappear. You can walk over the spot and never know that, below ground, life has stored its feast of chlorophyll until next year’s spring thaw. They sleep in summer and through the winter—the snowdrops, corydalis, virginia bluebells, daffodils….

Was Provincetown a dormancy for me or an emergence from? I think the latter. My dormancy as a poet was self-induced (family and ethnic background prolonged the tendency). My long off-season at FAWC reset my priorities for when to work, and how, and why.

On campus the following autumn, a former student spotted me on the quad. How was I, where had I been? Did I know that when students from my creative writing seminar saw each other, they’d sometimes nod meaningfully, lean in, and intone (he was leering now, loving the rhythm): “And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep/steady thy laden head…”? Apparently my ecstasy in class about enjambement was forgotten. No matter. They remembered Keats’ words.

Yesterday I stood up from weeding the gooseberry patch and paid attention to a long-term hunch: that I’d been fastening my kneepads upside down. I tried them the other way, cushiony part over kneecap, thin part below. Squat-kneeling again, the back of my knee was no longer working the velcro loose as it bent. This sort of thing also happens writing a poem. There, too, it can take several years to realize your hunch. The hours don’t count. I don’t count the hours.

My new collection, by a poet who did made her way back to Ithaca, will zoom launch via Odyssey Bookstore on November 9 at 7 PM.
                                                                                                        —MG, 26 October 2022

NEVER CEASE [by Mary Gilliland]

Persist, I say, fellow poets: if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. Here we are—making protest—or praise—or revelation—while others devote themselves to making war. In a world out to maim, kill, and discourage the sensitive, how does gardening steady my head?

I plant baby giants: dawn redwood! and the cucumber magnolia and tulip poplar whose 80’ leafy canopies will shade someone well after I take my last walk-away. The gardens around the house and in its woods, which for decades were bless-my-mess, are coming together now. My marriage is (almost) past the days when my husband would see me still out there and call: “Anyone would think that weeding is your spiritual exercise!” The life and art of insight! outdoors we expand: felling dead trees, clearing brush, dividing the perennials—over time.

Once-upon-a-times that we have lived are brought to mind by some featured plants. An enjambement of sorts, of our reincarnations, our reinvention of selves that are somehow also continuous. Fast growing Metasequoia, dawn redwood, the only one of its species that can prosper through the winters of NewYork State’s Finger Lakes, recalls the trees of Muir Woods that as we married we believed would live near us the rest of our lives. The only other time that I’ve heard trees and their earth breathe like those was on blotter acid—Skinner had handed these to us the spring when we housesat Kitkitdizze for Gary, the tabs printed with a double vajra—that we dropped in Minnewaska State Park Preserve while the mountain laurel was blooming, the spring after we drove back east from California.

The native tulip poplar, Liriodendron tulipifera, can be spotted here and there throughout our watershed—if you look way up. Not a common tree but unmistakable. Its large creamy blossoms remind me of magnolia and it’s a lucky walk when one turns up fallen on the forest floor. Three years ago I discovered that an actual magnolia variety could survive along with us! from the wildflower specialist at Cornell Botanical Gardens I brought home a grown-from-seed cucumber magnolia, Magnolia acuminata, that will someday flower in May. Not as fragrant as the North Carolina magnolias that lined the street where we lived when Peter was in grad school, any more than our northern vines of the same name might overwhelm us with such scent as Greensboro’s jasmine. But as the Irish say, it’s the same but different.

The whimsy and wistfulness of autumn is truly here when saffron crocus rises from the ground. Following weeks of the tinted varieties, now we are seeing the white. In Ithaca, these are the blooms that during our “[S]eason of mists and mellow fruitfulness” that convince the bees “warm days will never cease,” evidenced in this week’s adjoining photo.

Of course I’d like most of all to have a Handkerchief Tree, in order to hold close by me my most favorite city London. But the stock that gave rise to the rare specimen near Kenwood on Hampstead Heath is South African. Would it be too much to ask friends who know so much more about plants than I to find a representative variety that can withstand zero Fahrenheit??

Planting an eventually towering trees takes 10 minutes. Hundreds of hundreds of 10 minutes have been required to restore the century-neglected grounds around them, labor that infuses into even the most stubborn head gentleness and confidence. I sow seeds, keep no maps, wait for nature. How many times have I bent to unknown flora that pop up: Want more shade? Want more sun?
                                                                                                        —MG, 19 October 2022

LATER FLOWERS FOR THE BEES [by Mary Gilliland]

I garden at the end of a one-block cul de sac. This area bordering the woods is classified on the municipal maps as vacant land. Yes, it’s poetry. The gardens are anything but decorous, or planned. Strays are welcome. Wild volunteers turn out whimsical or handsome. Some alight of their own volition, or via bird droppings (the enormous blackberries!); other seeds I pocket on my trail hikes and plant when I get home. A tall sedge with seedheads large as three ears of wheat jammed together. A low-growing tuft of a sedge, with spindly stem and tiny-star seeds. The average sedge—which I’ve multiplied and transplanted so thickly that it composes two mini-lawns; they don’t mind the tread of feet, and never need mowing.

The fluffy seeds of White Snakeroot were once riders in my pockets. What is the name for darkest green? This is the color of snakeroot’s leaves, and they are heart-shaped with a very tapering point. Creamy clusters of  florets form large cottony flat-topped hats on the 3-foot mature plants. I encourage them, transplant them—here, then there—for years, but they never come to much. Suddenly, 2022 is a mast year for white snakeroot: a 50 foot long drift behind the dead-hedges in the newish sanctuary that my husband and I call Back East. I can no longer give snakeroot away to neighbors who see them everywhere already!

Boneset is cousin to snakeroot. But boneset’s umbel is even cottonier, and its leaves are lances, and perfoliate: it looks as though the stem is growing through the leaf itself. Boneset leaf magic, though, is the fact that there’s not one but two leaves involved around the stem—joined, and opposite each other. I love the late summer/fall bloomers, and these two species are thoroughworts. Where did that family of plants get its name?

The plants are always teaching me. At the base of Glastonbury Tor in the Vale of Avalon, my mind was turned from growing vegetables to growing flowers. In the Chalice Well garden, I reached down through magenta blooms to soft as lambs-ears silver-grey basal leaves and wondered whatever could this creature be. The plant is now a mainstay on the land I cultivate. I can’t tell you its name, for somewhere along the line a wrong name got recorded in the grooves of my brain.

                                         I garden in the shade on rock
                       transplant mullein, trellis pokeweed
          The bulbs for this place
are a tall order

The 9-page poem that holds those lines garnered compliments from editors but never a publication. Poets despite best effort may assume multiple magazine rejection means not good enough. But ‘Among the Trees,’ its title referencing Genesis 3:8, does reach print as the centerpiece of The Devil’s Fools, and Cynthia Hogue wows me, takes me by surprise, with her jacket comment highlighting this poem. My new book’s manuscript was a finalist in 2001 for NPS andcetera; its assemblage and re-assemblage ever since resembles the bricolage of gardening around my house. Last spring, Codhill Press selected my manuscript as not finalist but winner.

Now my husband will no longer have to keep the promise I extracted: to have Finalist carved on my tombstone. We think of poetry publishing as so scarce these days. But I’ve just learned that Harcourt picked Elizabeth Bishop’s first book from 800 manuscripts entered in a contest! With my mother’s mother I descend from midwife and iron welder who shipped to Philadelphia from the hunger roads of counties Mayo and Roscommon. Persist, I say, fellow poets: if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.

                                                                                                    ——MG, 12 October 2022

Steady My Laden Head [by Mary Gilliland]

The hours don’t count, I don’t count the hours. This is not a task but an activity. Unassigned. A practically involuntary part of the day, sowing itself in my unconscious during times I might not be physically involved. I’m winging it, without formal education. It looks like I have chosen to engage, but really the chooser was something larger that said Do.

What is done is admired by walkers on the South Hill Recreation Way, both people I have met before, and people I will never know. A couple with their dog stopped along the trail while I was weeding not far away, uphill: “When we see these flowers, every year, we know that spring’s really here!” This was during the era of my corralling Garlic Mustard by—every autumn—laying down Dame’s Rocket seedheads on areas among the trees where I’d weeded out G-M. Yes, “like a gleaner [I did] keep/steady my laden head across a brook”—the freshet, that is,
behind our shed, that by this time of year is a dry streambed. My strategy was to replace the invasive with a secondary invasive, one that blooms more prettily and at first glance looks like phlox. A place holder.

The scent of hesperis matronalis rises in the evening. The flowers bloom pink, mauve, white, purple and, sometimes, an eye-catching white streaked with one of the other hues, or vice versa. Those I would mentally note to let stand through the frost. The seeds matured, then I deliberately scattered them in new areas in order to multiply the striated enchantment. Which, last year, I discovered is caused not by genes but by a virus. Was it nature or culture that brought me the next-door neighbor whose PhD research focused on plant-virus interactions? Lizzie studied host and pathogen as they co-evolved; my brassica species, Dame’s Rocket, hosts turnip mosaic virus—resulting in variegated color in the flowers.

Turning the rocky hillside acre into a garden began with an earlier next-door neighbor’s retirement. He was of the tribe who trim every blade of grass to the same length, edge the sidewalk and allow no chipped paint on trim or siding.“Mary,” he asked after once more perfecting his holdings, “would you mind if I took some of those privet bushes out of your woods?” When purchased, our house had been closed in by invasive privet and Japanese honeysuckle, up to every door. By the time Walt posed his question, there was some green lawn, my husband’s joy. I imagined the clearance would lead to lovely walks in our very own wood after a day of teaching. But the cleared land was, next spring, thickly carpeted with a mystery plant. Helped by a few students, I pulled them all out. They returned. Pull. Return. And again. GarlicMustard had just begun its inexorable march across the Lower Forty-eight.

Hence the mass plantings: of deer-proof perennials that spread. Not so many rocket now, but cowslips, hellebore, brunnera, primrose varieties (including
Wanda!), pulmonaria, trachystemon, comfrey, andcetera, follow spring’s explosion of flowering bulbs, ephemeral pink corydalis, Virginia bluebells.

I garden at the end of a one-block cul de sac. This area bordering the woods is classified on the municipal maps as vacant land. Yes, it’s poetry.

                                                                                ——MG, 5 October 2022