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November 6th, 2009

07:21 pm
I like the brier.


        
Sarah Hannah

Greenbrier (Smilax rotundifolia)



You can scorch it, strip it, tear it down,

Wither it with caustic sprays, call it

Rampant and invasive, or resort


To more emotional descriptors

Such as vicious, invoke

Pathetic fallacy – ‘It chokes’; still,


I like the brier.

All the eaves and complications.


I like how green the grey

Oak trunk grows in its sleeve, how

It insinuates its weave against the sun,


How furtively it fruits in summer –

Turquoise beads among the curling spaces,

Deepening to wine.


I even like the lances –

Runic, every one –

Imprinting oaths across my skin:


I promise always to be contrary,

Creviced;


I promise to be arch, to inch

Among the disregarded –

Chitin, husk, and skull;


And finally, I promise to remain,

To hide and cackle in the great dark,

Fiercely inextricable.


    

SARAH HANNAH was nominated for the 2006 Pushcart Prize in the US and was a semi-finalist in the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2002. Her first collection, Longing Distance, was published by Tupelo Press in 2004. Her second, Inflorescence, came out in 2007, also from Tupelo Press. She died in June 2007.

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