Groundcover
The ground doesn’t belong to you but is also yours
in that it’s made of your body—
your cells, your pulsing, the things you’re remembering
now about your mother folding laundry in the hallway
as you drifted to sleep amidst that dim light.
Perennial, glow-gray, silky-lanate hairs,
so wooly, antispasmodic,
named “wooly woundwort”
as wound dressing, poultice, antiseptic.
These carpet below, hold the buttoned mass of us.
They’re a way to stem bleeding, analgesic,
eared-leaves, wrinkling warm,
not listening, ear-to-ear, the flowers,
sessile, without petiole, closest to the stem.
No distance of a leafstalk, to grow away from harm.
We have to come closer.
The cold silver bundles together.
The root is felt by the stem and by the leaf, felt.
Like what a family won’t say about death.
To stem, to stanch, to hide one with another.
We follow and are undetected.
Internally, we could steep it
in a tea for fevers, hemorrhaging,
a hidden, inhibited clotting,
weakness of the liver and heart.
Above ground we bend back
into alabaster stachys byzantine.
The lamb’s ear holds us
for a little while.
Molly Kugel is the author of Groundcover (Tolsun, 2022), as well as the chapbooks The Forest of the Suburbs (Five Oaks, 2015) and fo gheasaibh: poems of Rachel Carson (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2022). Read more.
"Groundcover" originally appeared in Groundcover (Tolsun 2022).