The Doctrine of Signatures
The woman who followed me from flower
To flower said Birthday? Anniversary?
And I shook my head among the arrangements
Until she shifted to Accident? Sickness?
Guiding and pointing and introducing
The Doctrine of Signatures, how all plants
Were created to serve us, their powers
To cure revealed by shape, by size, by shade:
The bloodshot blossoms of the eyebright
Heal pinkeye; the Chinese lantern plant
Is bladder-shaped for stones. Paracelsus,
She said, acknowledging her source, adding
Yellow plants for the liver, ginseng root
For general malaise, prescriptions
So simple we could arrange eternity
In a greenhouse if we knew the shapes
Of our weakest parts, my mother’s heart
Winding down while I thought of petals
Red and sugared as a lover’s gift.
And since then I’ve comparison-shopped
For pancreas, thyroid, lymph glands, walking
The aisles with such ignorance of form
I might as well choose a shape for the soul—
Lilac, lily, morning glory—as if
Resurrection could be watered and fed
While we search for the flowers that form
Like tumors, the buds that open into
The ominous mass on the x-ray,
And the seeds or spores that are scattered
Like great seasonings for the earth, blended
So perfectly they lie invisible
Until they rise from our astonished tongues.
Gary Fincke's poetry collections have won what is now the Wheeler Prize (Ohio State), the Wheelbarrow Books Prize (Michigan State), The Stephen F. Austin Prize, the Jacar Press Prize, and the Arkansas Poetry Prize. Read more.
“The Doctrine of Signatures” has been previously published in Poetry Northwest and in the collection The History of Permanence (Stephen F. Austin, 2011).