Snakeroot

gall-of-the-earth · white lettuce · lion's-foot — a charm

Down where the holler keeps its shade
and the spring forgets its name,
a green thing works the oldest trade:
to never twice the same.

It starts a leaf as plain as water,
round as a given word —
then comes the slow knife of the summer,
and the plain shape is cut, and cut, and stirred,

till it opens a hand of restless fingers,
more points than it can name,
and no two leaves along one stalk
will swear they are the same.

They called it snakeroot — for the bite,
they said; it draws the poison clean.
They called it gall, they called it milk,
they called it things between.

Carry it, the old ones said,
the year the snake comes through.
What sheds its skin and lives, they said,
is only growing true.

So let them keep the borrowed name
Prenanthes, hung on you at birth.
A truer word comes working up
like green through winter earth —

and you will wear it like a charm,
and you will not stay small.
Many-leaved, many-named, and here:
the changing thing. That's all.

For your twenty-first year.

You came up plain and round and whole,
and the seasons have been cutting you
into something with more edges, more reach,
and more of its own true shape ever since.

Say the new name like you mean to stay:

Nabalus