Sylvia Legris

A garland to fend off the dizzies. A garland to keep the quinsy at bay. March closes the seeded umbilicus. April opens the musty secundina. Equinox the half-melt rot. Easter the thin asquintable light.

Under Venus the sugared wound, the heart-strung-up, the viola d’amore. Under Venus the Pliny-prescribed, the horsehair-hanked — not plucked, tugged — the singly sung (catgut kidney-cuffs the caterwaul, a knockback to the viola bastarda). Kittenish! A scalloped flirtatious border — florid cordial pansies (candied adoration).Violaodorata. Parfait d’Amourish.

After Leonardo da Vinci 1 The long incision. The incipient voyage from aortic arch to thoracic inlet. Small-particled is the corpuscled city. (Bustling opuscula.) A city of animal electricity. A lowing cycling mass. Calm the cowed heart. Still the browbeating heart. Cool the controversial hearthstone. Let the blade intervene where the divine intersects bovinity. 2 Pour wax into the gate of an ox’s heart. Close the small doors of the heart via a template of hardened wax, a 
temple of vital gases, water with grass seed suspension, glass blown through a cast of calcined gypsum, plaster of Santo Spirito. Spiritous dissection, blood-sooty vapors, the dense dance of the Renaissance counts down a Galenic pulse.Musculo vivicare. Transit the venous. Bypass the 
arterial. Underscore the two-part cantus firmus in heat and motion. (The fixed heart burns slow, spurns fervor.)

Unblacken the holy mallow, the incorrupt, the foregut inconclusion. St. Cuthbert’s cole, a stalky stand-up, the deadpan peevish. Splenetic, the marooned fascicles, the testy watchman- hockleaf-clock. Ad hoc the anti- antibodies, the ripped-open open-pollinating poultice, the self-sowing aggrievement.

Complex amaryllis — two-faced, multiflorus, wrath-spathed ball of ire — grows flagrantly unfragrant. Pulp-fiery the take-no-prisoners Haemanthus. Bully! Bully! Bully the bloodflower! (Blood- thirsty suffice it to suffuse.) Transfuse the lily-livered, the raging un-aromatic, the arrogant blood-rivering spleen.

To sow the remote morose root. To sow the virtuous standby. The backup fodder-crop suffers not from seasonal vicissitudes, mildew and blast, caterpillar attack. Under Saturn sing the golden-sickled beet. Under Saturn sing the ringed mangelwurzel. The great turnip (the dick reuben!). The pickled paucity-strick stew.

Genus II. Lichen. On a scale of Lustrous to Sockeye, Fishscale to Fire-Dot. Not Ichthyosis: Lichen. Fruiting bodies in a calcareous spot. Goldspeck. Blushing. O the diffuse eruption of dazzling papulæ! Usher the Wild Lichen. Usher spring and the furfuraceous scurf recurs. The Brain-Scaled (the hairline cracked). The Blue-Blistered, the Earth-Wrinkled. Neither Strophulus nor stoppable. Like wildfire rash the crustose rush of successive crops. Tundra Sulphur, circumpolar, the snowy excoriations. So squats the Dog Lichen, the Freckle Pelt. Cobblestoned, chronic, the not contagious.

1 A pepper of  bees opens the pupils. An ensemble of aromatics Chorus aphrodisia, mariner’s root, bright sky and night star, heavenly rainbow. Amethyst, azure, blue flower-de-luce. Flowering ring. • White archangelic the bee nettle, the dead nettle. A hide of nettle cloth, of finely-nerved sedge. Take heed the edges, the pipes, the passages, the petal corridor, the corolla tube. • A blossom is a throat. Rose oil and hip. A ripped rose is a voice organ, time-cut and curt. Royally red and confidence- keeping, redder than Mars, redder than hot days and parched, Venus on the lips. 2 Muscle rose. Flesh rose. A verge toward red Then rustling redshank rose. Vines ascend the arch of aorta. Mercurial, the climbing nightshade, the bundle-branched bittersweet. • White-spotted hellebore under Jupiter and wind. Oak lungs, jovial lungs. Sea rush blows the lungs with sweet rose, carmine and sanguine, flaming red. Candleberry fires the blood. • Red is antispasmodic, cardiovascular. Great garden patience of Mars. May-blossom, hawthorn. Spring gushes red-veined with sorrel, bloodwort below Jupiter, red dock for longevity. 3 Venus stokes the throatwort. Ringing with wasps The good leaf. The rose noble. L’herbe du siège slackens the isthmus of the fauces. Gash-red and choking rose. • Double tongue. Bay laurel. Daphne of the sun. Yarrow charms wasps, snuffs the inveterate headache. Daphne sings the bees from the ears. • The voice reeds are a Queen Anne’s lace of wasps. Mercury abounds with buzz and wild carrot, jump-starts speech with hoar-strange words, a gargle of hog’s fennel and brimstone wort. 4 Under Leo, composure. Touchwood and rue Herb of grace. Anti-magical. Vinegar of the four thieves. Poison against poison. Rue before regret. Touch wood Ruta sets the garden free. • Lightning sulfur the garden prone to primrose and paroxysm. Pellitory- of-the-wall quells old hacking. An old cough. A new moon courtesy of wild clary. Eyebright. Clear eye (en toute bonne foi). • Sweep away the broom, the burdock, the beastly antipathy between ash tree and adder. Snakeweed. Dragon’s blood. Devil’s bit. Serpent’s tongue. Wickedness (a weak moon) licked & licked & licked. 5 What a commotion! Wild rocket, a racket Flesh and blood of wake robin, cuckoo point, the clear caroling rise & fall. Volatile dog’s mercury. Dog’s-grass. Dog rose. Hot fits and cold metallic blue. The indecisive indigo. • So the garden bellyaches. So what the gripes? Rows rife with tormentil, gallant herb of the sun. Five fingers, flesh and blood. Stamina, life’s long thread, root-red, the unhindered heart. • Leaves respire and rain returns blood-veined and blood dock, blood-colored juices. Red poppy a headache. Heartichoke the downhearted. Loosestrife calms the fugitive scarlet. Sweet slumber. The fleshy rootstock. 6 Enlist imagination under the banner of science. Erasmus Darwin, Flora attired by the elements. his Botanic Muse Sea lavender, sea holly, sundrops. Jacob’s ladder reaching ether. Wind rose. Sun rose. Water grass. • The loves of the plants. (The economy of vegetation.) Root, pith, lobes, plume, calyx, coral, sap. Air distributes the seeds of names. Windflower, digitalis. Tipsy and ethereal. Trade winds, vital light. Seeds within seeds. • Start from the soil, and win their airy way. The fifty-seeded heart’s delight, saturnine and doting wild. Heart’s-ease. Herb constancy. Pensée...    An opening. Call-me-to-you. Kiss-her- in-the-buttery. Meet-me-in-the-entry. 7 The yard wants what the yard wants. Rose Bloom of Ruth. Breath of life. Blush. Charisma. Compassion. Imagination. Ebb Tide and Nostalgia. Ground cover and climbers. Floribunda. Abundance. • A hybrid of bruise and steep, petal and dreg. Lungfuls of lamp flower, rose campion, rose of heaven. The moon shoulders roseroot, rosy-colored stonecrop. The neck laced with French rose, common rose, pomander of roses. • At the center of the garden the heart. Red as any rose. Pulsing balloon vine. Love in a puff. Heartseed, heart-of-the-earth. A continuous flow of red. 8 Nosebleed, staunchweed, sanguinary. List Thousand-leaved root of yellow. Thousand weed with leaves like feathers. Small birds flirt herb-of-Venus’ tree. If my love love me, nosebleed and yarrow. • Feverfew-profuse June and July. Agueweed, sweating-plant, boneset with yellow thrum. Venus yields to water. Boneset breaks the sun. • Past mudwalls and molehills, where the cowslips and the lungs moss, hedge bells, morning glory and the hundred-leaved rose, all the livelong organs rose — a catalogue, a desire, a wish. 9 Chaffweed whups the chin-cough. Life everlasting Venus hiccups dry wind and sandy rows. The garden ruminates cudweed, creeping roots June through September. Pearl-flowered. Eternal flower. • Take flower-gentle. Take knitbone and knitback. Ass ear. Blackwort. Slippery root. Saturn’s orbit comfrey-picked and sea-goat-prickly. Take sea wrack, knobbed wrack, bladderwrack. • Paralysis and palsywort the garden supplants fool’s parsley with imperatives! Forget-me-not. Forget-me-not. Forget-me-not. Mouse-ear to the ground. Borage for courage. Self-heal. All-heal. By crook or by hook-heal. 10 La voilà! Horsetail and paddock-pipes. Viola organista A hurdy-gurdyish drone. Pansy-meek with cattail and fretted tension. (Love-in-idleness.) The over-thinking viola. • Liverwort, liverleaf, liverweed. A low sun and Jupiter presumes three-lobed hepatica. Water hectors wind and wind blows sound into lungwort, bladderwort, kidneywort, the kidney-leaved sower weed, the hartwort. • Dame de coeur. The crowning heart. The garden wants it all: leaf, stem, root, the whole shooting match shoot system, timbre, pitch, fully chromatic rows, heart trefoil and arssmart under sun.

Onward the fairweather spleen. Onward the season of vent and caprice. Giovedì Grasso flies the meat, trees still larded with winter grease — ice, the Dead Time, the Flensing Time. Flirt fattened Thursday of December’s gorge. The twelve pigs of the zodiac stew the zeal, slow simmering giddy fizzling squeals. Uncloister the close-air surgical theater. Ungristle the knife-jester’s grip. Let the butcher carnival begin!