Milkweed

Yellow ranks of milkweed, their pods bursting with seeds, line the edges of our fading wildflower field where they stood sentry all summer.  I spent years encouraging them to naturalize and, now, along with the lupines, echinacea, and blue lobelia, they routinely come back and spread a little farther every spring.  At full height, they’re ungainly plants, to be honest. Pods, leaves, and flower clusters, all stickily attached to a central stalk, look a bit like something Rube Goldberg might have invented. I wasn’t surprised to learn that milkweed is one of the most complex structures in the plant kingdom, comparable to the orchid in its many shapes and parts. At the end of one of the driest summers on record in the Berkshires, the milkweed leaves are as parched and wrinkled as crepe paper, and some of the pods have already popped open, releasing next year’s silken bounty into the golden afternoon.

Milkweed

by Bradford Tice

I tell myself softly, this is how love begins—
the air alive with something inconceivable,
seeds of every imaginable possibility
floating across the wet grasses, under
the thin arms of ferns. It drifts like snow
or old ash, settling on the dust of the roadways
as you and I descend into thickets, flanked
by the fragrance of honeysuckle and white
primrose.

I recall how my grandmother imagined
these wanderers were living beings,
some tiny phylum yet to be classified as life.
She would say they reminded her of maidens
decked in white dresses, waltzing through air.
Even after I showed her the pods from which
they sprang, blossoming like tiny spiders,
she refused to believe.

Now, standing beside you in the crowded
autumn haze, I watch them flock, emerge from
brittle stalks, bursting upon the world as
young lovers do—trysting in the tall grasses,
resting fingers lightly in tousled hair.
Listen, and you can hear them whisper
in the rushes, gazing out at us, wondering—
what lives are these?