Again, I am filling in the gap left by Rosendahl (no entries for “Y” in his otherwise extensive glossary.) I think yarrow, a member of the aster family, is very beautiful, and I am drawn to its pungent scent. I also love that it can, warrior-like, hold its own against the juglone secreted by our black walnuts. Today’s poem, “Common Yarrow,” rises out of my explorations into the botanical name for common yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and the plant’s presence in human history in Europe and Asia. Thinking about the different histories and uses of this familiar garden flower helped me to get to know it a little better. I will be tucking a little more yarrow into our garden in the coming weeks!
In the last days of a long-ago marriage money was tight. It was high summer in Louisiana, a swelter, a sauna. My then-husband had found work with a beekeeper, traveling with a crew to check hives. It didn’t pay much but was honest, worked as a metaphor, better than his old job welding deep inside oil tankers, he said, coming home stung, his sinuses swollen by all the wind-blown pollens.
I was academically employed, a grad student on summer break, fiddling with Latin, the declensions of irregular verbs, the moody subjunctive, and trying to keep the kitchen in that rented house free of shiny black tree roaches, but closing my eyes before I turned on the lights, giving them time to scuttle back into cracks. One evening—I’d fixed jambalaya—his boots dropped on the back porch and he came in with news: there was work for me in the honey house.
I showed up at the low concrete building, a warren of ill-lit rooms, built for something else. The beekeeper showed me how to set wax patterns on the wire sheets, slide the ready frames into wooden hives, portable as document boxes. I got the hang of it in half an hour, fell into a light trance alone in the honey house, some far-off door open, its frame filled with sunlit greens and soft, lulling breeze. I recited scraps of old poems I’d learned by heart: Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment/Love is not love… I liked the rhythm, the hum and slide and rattling thunk of old wood. It reminded me, I guess, of the shuddering return of my typewriter carriage. Love is not love, Love is not love….After great pain, a formal feeling comes…then something stirred in my peripheral vision. Something ghostly crawled toward me, red-eyed,
balding, dragging a long pink tail. I stood and screamed! It hissed and ran and it was a long time before my heart stopped thumping but I did catch hold of myself. Taking deep breaths, I saw the funny side— me, jumping on the chair, like a cartoon housewife startled by a mouse. I only recognized, weeks later, that turning point, fear-born gift of clear sight, despite long hiding: a fierce intent to claim my own power.
Today’s poem was a collision with current events (my review this week of the Latin verbs “sum” and “possum” or “I am” and “I can” and a rich and deep conversation yesterday) and an old memory surfacing. (It was in Lake Charles, Louisiana, as a graduate student of poetry, that for fun I began my peregrinations through the Latin language. When I left Lake Charles, I also left my first marriage.)
The anomalous beauty of the larch fascinates me. It is a conifer but not an evergreen. Its heart wood is salmon-pink. It is the hardest of the soft woods, and its small cones resemble roses or lilies. And the larch is very long-lived compared to our human span, often 600 years old, with documented trees standing a thousand years. Larches are most striking in October but I like to think of them now, in spring, spinning nutrients from the soil into fresh green needles, soft pink cones filled with seed.
