Yearning Ways
Some of them are taproots, some
are spreading roots. With the quackgrass,
a sturdy rootstock. I recognize
the maneuvers: buried rhizomes
of beggar weed, long-sleeping seeds
of bitter dock. For canes and reeds,
they are leafy runners.
Their aim is true toward any sun-slit
opening in the multi-storied canopy,
any crack of clay or mortar, through
any ice-broken web across a boulder.
There’s one now, a green squeeze through
the splinter seam in that fence post.
Up, outward, and into the deeps,
goosegrass, witch grass, panic
grass, crowfoot grass and nut grass.
And I’ve felt the keenness of their tactics,
haven’t you? Spurs of bristlegrass,
milk thistle or sow thistle, needles, nettles
of sand bur, hooked spines, barbed
awns, bristly tufts. Blood can be proof.
Straining contrivances all—tangled
mats of knotweed and carpetweed,
swaying airy reach of wild vines (morning
glory, tack weed, grape), bold rankness
of burdock and tarweeds, plus the toadrush
love of slushy muck. Even mossy slime
has its loaded armies.
The slip and slither, the feint, twirl,
snatch, catch and hold. Which one
hasn’t sought, pushed, striven,
probed, beseeched, bemoaned?
I know these ways, all of them,
angelic, obscene.
PATTIANN ROGERS has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently Quickening Fields from Penguin/Random House, 2017. Read More
Pattiann Rogers’ poem “Yearning Ways” was previously published in Holy, Heathen Rhapsody (Penguin Group, 2013) and is reprinted here by permission of the author.