Listening, with plants
And, now,
intentionally, I steer
my body
toward
a direction
that has no name―
the world’s resonance, my body’s edges
thingless and alive
luminous : the vapor around all things
space―stones, plants, water, earth, its animals
inner-atmospheres
concentric, crystalline globes
transparent, soft, invisible ethers
revolving
this breath
horizon
life
offered
my hands
my own face
the eye
of a rose, a rock
to be fields of
I will submit
if you’ve ever lost your body,
you’ll understand―
the heart, the voice,
entrained
and like a single word is only
world with an l
removed, so are we
the same
as this sound,
only we’ve taken something on
that’s confused things
remember
cross the celestial equator of this sentence
northward : at the teeth of the equinox
the tropic of the tongue, contorted
a coven of milk thistle
a rippling of seeds, sown belly to belly
a bright feathering : helix of osprey’s wing
belts of cinnamon ferns and dandelion pods
celandine, sliced
thick ribbon of vulvae blood, zipped into the voice
skin book, synaptic to the mouth
bury me in the fetal position
slip my body in oils
a circlet of shells / rosehips, splitting
vigil me with red ochre
wrap the thigh bones in
carve me at the open mouth
of a cave . fractal horn
and flasked moon
derange the fabric of the I — little epic, rippled into a delirious unhemming
then, hatch me from little boxes
of sound : each mouth
a lady slipper : the raw material of glaciers : the hull
a swarming, midwifes the dead
all this after the last hoar frosts
mongrel voiced : a hymnal
of light / of vegetation
I see wood anemone
whorled aster
lobelia : loosestrife
purple boneset
ghost pipe
beebalm and lace
water snakes
cattail and coneflower
coronas of primrose, bittersweet
nightshade
and the moon, sown in
Danielle Vogel is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and herbalist working at the intersections of poetry, ecology, somatics, and ceremony. She is the author of Edges & Fray, The Way a Line Hallucinates Its Own Linearity, and Between Grammars. She teaches at Wesleyan University and makes her home in New England with the writer and artist Renee Gladman. This poem, "Listening, with plants," is a selection from the notes she's been collecting since 2011 on plant communication, healing, and geomancy.