The Brooklyn Rail

Think about a word: grass –

about an individual grass
then about a hundred species of grass.

At first you look and see a large field.

Look closer and you will see
the grasses in the field.

We are standing, boxed by a hot window
our back to the fields.

Lift the grasses from a box
and lay them out across the field.

A man picks up
a golden stalk –

claw-like
slender auricles
clasped at the blade.

Don’t worry about your grasses
falling apart – grasses
grow to disintegrate!

When a grass falls apart
you have a chance to notice
each individual floret –

what separates one grass
from another.

On the paspalums grass:
sessile spikeletes.

On the panicums grass:
broad basalnotes.

Scattered along the axis
we form a rosette –

we are bunched, decumbent culms
the involute blades of lovegrass.

See how the branches inflouresce?

Count the glumes.
They will put out seeds.
They will begin to reveal themselves –

Buffalo grass

Witch grass

Black bent

Barley

The people in the church begin to talk
like leaves with ciliate ligules –

If you split the rhizomes
of the iris in summer.

I’ve never seen the blue
of a blue stem, says another.

We are tiny radiating windmills
at a dinner party of grass.

Dissect the seedhead

peel the sheath.

Oh flutists of the field
wind-blown Graminoid –

walk into the greenly singular, singing

the long sight line

monochrome field.

How we love the undamaged, neutral space.

Note the scale change

point of digression.

To the north a pronghorn

freezes in the meadow –

fine Fescue, monocotyledon.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand
what the symphony is saying –

how the wind plays harps in the grass.

Note the modulations – light

to dark. How the setting down of art

is as important as its making.

You will look for a pattern
and see none.

You will look for openings –

they will close from you.

For a moment

you see it as a whole. Then turn –

the grass –

how it fractures.