I’m using daily prompts associated with Inktober (artists doing ink drawings) to spur poetry this month. The poems flow from the prompts, though it may not be obvious (at all); and sometimes the poems are revisions of earlier poems that came to mind when I mulled the prompt. If there’s a photo in the post, it was chosen after the poem was written. I’m “showing my work” by offering some of the words, phrases, associations that came to me for each prompt. The poems may or may not have anything to do with gardens, gardening, or “nature” as it’s commonly considered. To see all the poems (once they’re written), check the Inktober landing page.

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Today’s prompts: RIPE and ENCHANTMENT

Ripe associations: ready, juicy, ripe for the picking, ripe old age, time is ripe, favourable, mature, plump, prepared, completed, conditioned, mellow, perfected, prime, timely, opportune, auspicious, lush, developed, sweet, pulpy

Enchanted associations: put under a spell, deluded, Latin incantare (sing), bewitched, delighted, charmed, captivated, dazzled, enraptured (to be carried off, kidnapped, raped), entranced, enthralled (in someone’s power), beguiled, spellbound, fascinated, mesmerized, absorbed, transfixed, magic, seduce, I put a spell on you, power of suggestion, love potion, “It’s such a colossal effort not to be haunted by what’s lost, but to be enchanted by what was.” — Jandy Nelson

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Poem:

Transubstantiation

Over time,
what’s planted fresh and compact,
tenanting only its own space and no more,
relaxes. Seasons shift,
shadow and light quaver in the landscape,
empyrean timelapse. Plants set seeds, show their faces
to the closest star and decipher the steamy messages
of the spell-sent rain, remember some deep enchantment
salvaged quick within their grooves and ridges.

Over time,
comfrey drops its blackening bristly leaves to mulch,
mushy lush provender sucked and tapped at the root;
baptisia and lupine shed their husky pods,
later the rest crumbles, falls, or is felled by the clipping gardener
in spring, oh sweet rush of heady nitrogen tended and
primed by bacteria below for all the saints above, rejoicing, feasting;
those weedy muckers — clover, lambsquarters, chickweed, plantain —
espying the hardpan, the clods, the leaching, move in
to cultivate their own gardens in my garden,
patchwork picnickers spreading across the swath,
and I do mean spreading,
tended lingeringly by the creeping many-legged set.

Over time,
what started as a plan has become
more a happenstance. So much flopping,
seeding, spreading, rafts of flouncing exits,
improbable arrivals, mysterious transpositions
and tearful undoings. The bosky hostas alone have
dislodged dozens, some I no longer remember
though I chose them all with care and hope
once.

Now the garden has ripened
like bloomy brie — fungal, yielding, gold-tinged,
lusciously intermingled —
loitering and biding until it’s ready,
both vital and dying, plenary magic
sung into being by vanishing time itself.

© MMWms 2019

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back border: August 2011 / August 2019