I thought I went out to fulfill task
with you – a third, non-personal “it.”
The community called “city of . . .”,
the institutional entity demanded that
“those concerned encounter and correct
what was out-of-ordinance on their property …”
Weeds! Thistles!… And Cirsium arvense,
lovely as the purple flower that
belies the surrounding prickles and stings,
but noncompliant to the institutional ethos
of kept lawn and Round-Up Ready life.
I knew mostly what I’d heard of you,
an oft-cursed, prickly and handle-with-gloves invasive weed,
a millions-of-seed-producing scourge to grain farmers,
and the joyful feast winter feast of Purple Finch!
I was so called, predestined perhaps,
to willfully meet you on your turf,
so I begrudgingly pulled on knee-boots,
brought whetstone to scythe, and
set off into the holiness of early morning.
Out there to meet you,
to know you beyond summons or task,
it was thistle to beard, inside to out.
From reclining comfort of deck to
hacking through new greens of meaning:
burning and itching deep greens,
prickling, scratching light greens,
yellow greens, lime greens, olive greens,
rashing, sneezing, tangling, tripping –
so many shades of green!
And growing somewhere in all this greening,
I was surprised with a new joy of knowing
unknown before your call.
I forgot you among the columbine,
yellow pistils, stamens dew-wet and dripping
with morning promise and awe.
Pink-flushed and shaded purple,
how could you remain mere task?
You beckon me on with the daisies,
and I wander from show
to show, wondering
upside down and over
each dew-steeped floweret.
I drift back between thistle and flower
to the planting times of this one-something
acre prairie. Seven years pass in one
step, my 27 year-old mind
constantly surprised to be in a body over fifty.
Big blue stem, Indian grass,
flax flowers, and thistles I once dug in
earth softened by spring showers –
now where did I lay down that scythe?
The slough grass is 3 feet tall
and dripping but I plough through.
Dew-legged I meet you, oh Canada Thistle!
European-born you’ve arrived,
as have mine, perhaps on the same boat.
I, too, came as a weed to Chippewa
and Dakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Ojibwa,
Fox and early Arapahoe – all
Minnesotans when Minnesota meant
Land-Of-Sky-Blue-In-Waters.
Did my kind march to cut them down
even as I lay my scythe to you?
Swing, whuur-op and slice!
Swing, whuur-op and lop!
You are resilient – a Type A, Alpha weed,
pushing my scythe to its limit, strength to strength.
I feel my steel winning, but so brief, a day.
Neither this body nor its descendants
will ever overcome all your number,
even in this four-acre sampling.
Still I plunge ahead, hands cramping,
drawn into hollow, rocky slope,
and mustard flowered depth.
Wring-hook slides and slips
as the fifty year-old handle shrinks in the heat,
throwing off my rhythm. I should have
soaked the handle in the slough
overnight, but I readjust to slay scores more.
The old scythe is so well-crafted and
like you, will remain for grandchild to behold,
to marvel upon long after I’m gone.
Swinging this steel against you, Cirsium,
I wonder at my scythe’s Maker, envisioning
the motion of hand and wrist as extension of
arm, muscle, sinew, bone, body, heart, mind, and will.
How often did he[1] test and adjust his emerging creation?
Laying row after row of golden wheat or oats,
smiling at the feast for family, flock and horses –
but today I am hunting you, slicing-after-you
with this piece of history, drawn in over my head
through vegetative enclaves of eight foot thistles
towering over sow-thistle like trees.
Deep in now and I am enveloped in thistle-shade,
cool and quiet for a moment – but I’m moving again,
smiling, swinging, knowing you anew in the company of others,
chuckling at such mixed community, wincing
at the prick where bared knee knows the
bite of your steely white barbs!
On hillside above this two-acre pond,
bemused at this forced engagement,
this wedding of steel with knowing you,
I remove Tilley hat of cotton sail cloth.
Coolness breaks across sweat-stung eyes,
and I watch as breeze sends aspen leaves a-quaking,
their flattened petioles catching wind like no other leaf.
I step back, leaning against trunk and into eleven years of growth,
before house and restored prairie. I remember
the tree planter looking at me quizzically when I asked,
“How much do you want to take an aspen
from that edge of my father-in-law’s wood
and plant it on the pond’s far side?”
He smiled, and standing shoulder to shoulder- he could envision with me.
“Same price,” he said in a voice that spoke heart to heart.
Now I am standing in that vision,
imagining even more, a golden fall forest of hundreds,
here, across the pond, where Cirsium has called me.
Will others come to look from this side of knowing?
I pray they will walk over, from task to call,
and gaze from this side, too!
Finding more thistle than my arms wish,
I pause, then desist. I knew you
as thistle, as category, as object –
but to know you in variegated community?
I could not without being drawn into
what seemed a morning duty; if only I then
knew the calling that would come through you!
Oh Cirsium! I see more of you tucked between
tree and pond in places the weed inspector
cannot see – and there, where you have already
bloomed, finches snatch hungrily at your seed!
But I leave your purple to Gold Finch;
energize their southward flight!
Weary and wiser,
I rest my scythe.
Too often I wish-dream for callings without thistles,
but how else can this Creation given gift come to me
if not back through body to soul, heart, and mind.
A realization inhabits me anew
with appreciation, and repentance-
the task becomes
a means of knowing my ignorance
before meeting you,
O blessed Cirsium arvense!
rjs 2009
roderator 