The Practice of Talking to Plants
Mama & i, we talk to plants, for
we are short girls close to the ground
& speech is the golden miracle—;
i learn to write while she says honey (making a fire-pouch
in the y ) to a speckled
banana whose existence is energy broth.
To limp chrysanthemums she says Come on & drops
a Bayer aspirin in; i curve our letters near a cholla
after it lent some needles to my leg—
We’re not good relaxers, childhood & i,
we suffer a leafy need while God is a missing
hypotenuse. We’ll not a dreaded dandelion meet
before her voice arrives at low violets.
In summer, when spicy seeds escape so fine
a pepper tree to make sashay for the lahn-ger-ay drawer,
we speak to spices they put on Jesus,
those poor bright spices staring in the dark…
He hath numbered every hair on your head, she said,
meaning she hath numbered the hairs…
when we are out with our strangeness
in the west— she in her desert, i on a mountain
crouching near Lilium parvium
with the same amount of frail our mother feels,
—it will be quiet for a while but syllables
are there: inside a leaf, a syllable,
inside a syllable, a door—
BRENDA HILLMAN is the author of ten collections of poetry, from Wesleyan University Press, most recently Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the Griffin International Prize for Poetry, and Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days (2018). Read More
Brenda Hillman’s poem “The Practice of Talking to Plants” appeared in Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Wesleyan University Press, 2013)