NER Ulysses Reading Series: National Poetry Month Edition - April 17, 7 PM, Humanities House, Middlebury College
Would that you had
only known what was not
catnip, was not mint!
With clueless individuality
you invaded its company
and now will attend
to your inattention,
will heed this understory plant
who knows where its strength lies:
in histamine, serotonin,
acetylcholine delivered
by the single cells
of its stinging hairs.
The absence of doubt
in its mind is felt by you
as the burning numbness
of an encounter with naturalism
knowledge makes worse.
Soaked or cooked, it soothes
the pain it causes.
You could just do the work.
A nutritional as well
as metaphorical powerhouse,
it kept the northern hermits
alive another day
to flog themselves with it.
Above and belowground parts
differ in pharmacological properties:
identify your ailment
before you approach.
Should the previously indicated
be contraindicated,
all the world’s vitamins A and C,
all the protein and iron in the world
won’t help you.
Where nettle grows,
says local custom, so grows
healing dock, whose leaves,
broadfaced and not very bright,
may initially provide
a cooling sensation,
but there’s less evidence
for its status as a remedy
than there is for the modest virtue
of fooling yourself.
Urtica dioica, sting
of two houses. To learn this
lessens no one’s pain.
It’s as the ancients say:
sufferings are products,
not voids or defects. Comforts
can only lie alongside them.

 

 

 

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