Poetry

Rosemary


Rosemary
 
Bud-pierce, sun-talon, blood-briar—spring
insists on renaming itself.

Are you prepared for the day he won’t know your name?
And I might have answered,

Lord of milk and suck, Lord of straddle-these-thighs, what is 

my name
compared to the ten thousand unspoken, solemn or spangled,

names of God? And I might have answered,

I’ve forgotten how to prepare, I’ve forgotten how to pray . . .

but I am learning now
to retrieve stray wordlings that shake loose from his sentences—

chalice and shovel, hold me, buried root
and to say them as a rosary is said, or a mantra.

And perhaps I can also pray

with the cutting of rosemary I scissored from a clay pot
on a sill of the sun.

Smell this, I say—

stroking his shoulders and his neck with an arabesque
of its green fragrance.

Smell this . . . Who cares what we call it?