Patricia Clark

One of the most enduring memories of my mother is her fascination with plants. I swear she carried a shovel in the trunk of the family car simply so she could command my father to stop: “I see something I want to dig up.” My mother’s fascination with plants didn’t endear herself to me. Sometimes I was sent with my siblings to be lookouts for the park ranger, a task I didn’t appreciate. I was very law-abiding then; today, not so much. I also remember tedious times wandering aisles of nurseries looking at perennials. But women become their mothers, as they say, and in time I came to have a serious addiction to gardening and to plants, sometimes waking me in the night with names like “eupatorium” or “rose campion” on my lips, if I was on the hunt for a particular plant.

“Tawny Light” connects my love of plant life and vegetation with reading I did as a child. I loved the book The Borrowers (1952) by Mary Norton and the idea of “little people” living among us. Yes, I was seeing a landscape of great beauty here in the scene of the poem but I was also imagining that I could climb into a blossom at the top of a stalk and sleep there. That melded with a memory of deadheading a hibiscus bloom and being shocked by the electricities of a buzzing bee inside the blossom in my hand. Luckily I didn’t get stung.

“Centers of Gold” reveals another love of mine: visual art. I like to surround the desk where I write with postcards or books about artists. If I get stuck coming up with something to write about, I’ll study one of these images or paintings and see what happens. I’m convinced that the ekphrastic exercise of looking closely at a painting leads me in a meditative process to insights I wouldn’t otherwise reach. At the poem’s end I see a shadow in the painting by Gustav Klimt that seems quite ominous. I was led there by the tree’s apples and the field of wildflowers.