Foxgrape
Vitis labrusca, “wild vine”
Smotherer of trees with your swinging drapes like some crazed
interior decorator, hoarder of light, bearer of epithets,
at least if we let you spread: sprawling your rough-heart
leaves and throwing your entwining vines over raspberry and sweet
maple, pussywillow, inkberry, mountain mint. If you went tendril
to root with kudzu, the vine that ate the south, maybe you’d lose, but no
bet: you foxgrapes are tough. And how often do you even bear?
Only in full sun, and even then, your scant fruit
is mouthpucker, suckcheek, bitterwine, sour grapes.
Otherwise, you’re a barren woman, your only legacy
whatever you can make of yourself, or, given
your multifarious propagations, yourselves:
the soft flesh of those jaggedheart leaves, obverse gleaming
palest tawny-gold and furred with wool-white hairs,
or else those forked and glowing gold wires coiling
and curling, groping in spiral rings around their invisible axis,
feeling for support, tendriling and twining toward light and away
from the grave, outward and upward. By your fruits
shall we know you, and in shade, your fruit is the glory
of afternoon pouring goldengreen through your splayed hands,
and the wildness for which they were named, and the energy
with which they interlace and twist, braid and interweave
with and around and over all the world puts in your way,
or when nothing else is available, with and around yourselves,
the work of the climb giving rise only to the sunlit
work of the climb, to more leatherskin,
barrenseed, sungreen, wordhoard, vinetwine.
CATHERINE CARTER’s poetry collection By Stone and Needle (LSU Press) is forthcoming in fall 2025. Read more.