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Wild Onion


In botany, Allium stellatum, of the family
Liliaceae, cousin to trillium, Solomon's-seal
and bellwort, whose root, bulb, leaf and stem

are edible or medicinal; fodder for squirrel,
elk, deer, poultice for boils, anodyne for fever,
sting of bee and wasp, amulet to ward off

dizziness or croup—from the Old French
oignon, and the Latin unio, meaning oneness—
organism of obfuscation and trumpery

whose lavender blossoms deftly belie
the flagrant acidic breath that draws us
now, step-by-step, up from the river's bank

to its grassy open bed. Siren of the olfactory—
most evocative of the senses—its leaves
bristle and flare, summoning to each of us

a summer kitchen, and in it, a mother, aproned
and dewy, weeping at her chopping block. . . .
But we are, after all, animal, and what seduces

here, in the shank of the day, is vegetable:
a booty we will dig for like dogs and take home
for our supper, a shill, a shindy, a caustic pearl.




What Comes Next

               for Sue Driskell


On a bank above the Gihon a woman
is digging up the remnants of a shoe,

excavating with a stick, then with her fingers,
a heel, a tongue, the inner and outer soles.

Below her, the river is speaking of time
and erosion, of passage and loss—a story

she does and does not hear. Balanced
on her haunches, she sifts a deeper layer

of soil, unearthing a few grommets,
a blunt, abbreviated nail. All that is given,

the river insists, will also be taken.
But she is oblivious, distracted by a crow

in its vocal descent from the ridge
to the branches of a pine overhead

and when it fixes her with its brazen
gaze, when it boldly repeats its alarm

she blinks once and bends again
to her labor. Even as it vanishes

she forgets, as she forgets herself
in this animistic place. On her knees

in the dirt, assembling the pieces, she wonders
what sort of man, in what circumstance,

abandons a leather shoe. But it is late,
the day has turned, and above the ridge

clouds are massing, low and laden with rain.
And only now, in her haste to gather

the fragments and depart, does it come
to her: how large the shoe, how large

the foot that wore it, as long and broad
as her husband's. And what comes next

is the inertia of sadness, so that she neither
rises to leave nor resumes her work.

MYRNA STONE'S poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and Green Mountains Review, among others.  Her first collection, The Art of Loss, is published by Michigan State University Press in May, 2001.  She is the recipient of two Fellowships in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council, and a Full Fellowship from Vermont Studio Center.

"Wild Onion" originally appeared in Poetry and "What Comes Next," originally
appeared in New Orleans Review.  The above poems are taken from a new work in progress.

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