The Hosta
As I raked the putrid leaf-shelves
shaling beside oak-root at the yard’s end,
the drool-cloaked earth crouped up
a corm—seed of the hosta—shagged in dirt.
A green flame ribboned out—
ovate fire a-flicker—and I recalled
chucking the cold, knotty heart for dead
before spring. But here it was again:
giboshi, funkia, plantain lily, claimed child
of Nicolaus Thomas Host who
served the last Holy Roman Emperor,
before Napoleon won Austerlitz.
So I took it whole in my hand,
dug fingers into the chunk-wet soil
to fish out a purse for the hatching egg
though it was long from loam’s guzzle.
And I felt the perennial thing taken
back, the arterial field convulsing
with spring as my hands ladled dirt
to a grave that would swell, utter forth.
JESSE BREITE’s recent poetry has appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, Tar River Poetry, Fourteen Hills, and Rhino. Read more.