“The Supposed Degeneracy of Animated Nature in America”

Honeysuckle lathers its way up silver maple, black gum,
sumac: slipped free

from the garden, home became the fallen world—fences’ refusals
to erase, to flower upon. The theory

was everything new is everything we’d loved—even as it flickered

away from us—in decline: travel telescoped
to correspondence and regret, landscape

to mirroring disappointment we visioned as God’s eyes, cast down on us
until we turned back to tasks, speaking wilderness

into a continent, nearly making it so. This, when word

was act, when what lacked a name
lacked place, and what cast no shadow

had no soul. But all landscape is the record
of migration, these trees having fled the wilderness of ice

flowering behind them, what seemed beauty

an invasion, deliverance. Outsider, how you must work
to be loved, stitching yourself

continually into view, persuasion’s green archetype tongued
with butter and cream: how you would

kill for it. Each new bloom’s a bride’s glove, removed to receive

the symbol of union, what’s absent,
here, what might shimmer just this near the palm, mapped,

as any of these net-veined leaves, with private flight diving
into the wrist throbbing with voices

stifled because the word had already been spoken

and splintered, and what appears two
separate waves of color, milk

and honey, is
an illusion: each white flower yellows into its own

forgetfulness, what makes it

fall, what restores it to the garden
beneath—what so much belief in beauty

has nearly exterminated—revealing
the empty socket on the stem, the blindness always there

at the heart of flowering.

First published in Shenandoah; forthcoming in Biogeography

Note on “‘The Supposed Degeneracy of Animated Nature in America’”: This was the title of botanist Stephen Elliott’s 1791 valedictorian speech, rebuffing the theory of degeneracy, a theory which, as Alexander Wilson put it, “would leave us in doubt whether even the Ka-te-dids of America were not originally Nightingales of the Old World” (A Sketch of the Botany of South Carolina and Georgia, Stephen Elliott).