Closed Gentian

after Charles Simic’s “Stone”
 

inside the blue there is a buzzing
inside the buzzing, a bee
inside the bee

a beeing   reveling                                  

as I pass by   the closed gentian holds its secret
close   at summer’s end, clusters of terminal
blue flowers whorl
but in their bulging plump budness

never open

to be blue
and go into the bloom
would be my way

let someone else pluck the fullness

or let me be the bee, hungry   to urge open
with my sturdy legs and furry tongue   the fused,
closed-lobed corolla-tip,
enter the dark   nectary with my head, rub

by chance       

my chest across some fertile goodness, lay upon it
another’s gold   and sip from the hidden cup: wings
shivering against the inner sky’s veined blue veil

The Loon’s Call

after and for Robert Bly, 1926-2021
 

On the rocky knoll above Lake Damariscotta
come pause under the fragrant horse chestnut
that pulses with hundreds of drunken            

nectar-thieving bees, each white-blossomed spire
a sitar buzzing somber in the mood of C-minor.
Did I tell you how I long to live

inside a sitar note, to be pressed by pained fingers
into song? To ache is one joy. Another, how the bees work             
all day to fill their pockets with dust. Robert, you walked

off the Minnesota farm in winter. Those you taught
make new tracks in the snowy fields of books. Today,
I trailed the loon’s call at dawn and found the well-

trodden path to lady slippers swollen from their long
wandering bloom. At the wave-rippled shore, my feet
left only slippery shadows on the sand. It’s all right

to be quiet, praising the stars that set. I hear you
echoed in poems of your old teachers, the gruff snarl
of a bear, and that great grief cry of heavy-

boned loons, so many laboring across dark water
to fly while one pierced the mirrored surface
called under by the downwelling swell of silence.

Alison Granucci is a poet and naturalist living in the Hudson Valley. Her work is published or forthcoming in several journals including RHINO (Second Place, Editor’s Prize), Tupelo Quarterly, Pangyrus, About Place, Connecticut River Review, and Subnivean (Poetry Award finalist). Founder of Blue Flower Arts literary speaker’s agency, Alison is at work on her first collection and is co-editing an anthology of new bird writing with J. Drew Lanham.

Header original photo of gentians by Paul Reeves Photography, courtesy Shutterstock.