Still Life with Bloodroot
(Sanguinaria canadensis)
Brain-veined, cabbaged
around a single bud, in barest
canopy
your one winged leaf unfurls
to a lemon crown of anthers, to
ghostwhite petals’ quick
thinning to translucence, to
capsule
unzipping its pod of pursed seeds
nut-brown, glossy
as tiger eye, elaiosomes’
umbilical froth
coiling each globed bead—the
dormant future figured
as apple, and worm, though your
whole
is generative: even these filmy
members
winnow ants—copper baubles
spider-wired
to filigree—feed their young,
leaving the seed to sprout
from nest debris. There are those
who thrive
in margins, who survive the wild
shrinking: coyote, raccoon,
dandelion, fire ants
overrunning forest and field, who
take the bait but
destroy the seed. Outsiders, can
we help
but hunger? Bloodroot, you
unscroll
to the staggered world of fence
posts
no new flowers. Your given name a
study in slicing
a clotted root to bleed, this
world so beautiful
we could eat you whole: Blood
Root,
Red Root, Tetterwort, Sweet
Slumber—nest
I call you by, scouting your
woods;
whether as winnow- or fire- I come
to you, what begins each spring
one more vanishing.
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Sandra Meek
has published six books of poems, including Still (Persea
Books, January 2020), An
Ecology of Elsewhere (Persea,
2016), Road
Scatter (Persea,
2012), and Biogeography,
winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo 2008). Recipient of
an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the PSA’s Lucille Medwick
Memorial Award, and three Georgia Author of the Year
awards, she is co-founding editor of Ninebark Press,
Georgia Poetry Circuit director, Phi
Kappa Phi Forum’s
poetry editor, and teaches at Berry College. Visit her
at www.sandrameek.com
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