Pokeweed

The calendar confirms fall’s arrival but Houston remains hot and miasmic. Plants spawn and proliferate overnight, and in a week the left side of our house grows impassable. The bougainvillea and Mexican lime send out long arching shoots, pale green and beautiful and covered with thorns, and the fronds of the sega palms are green, fern-like needles. For self-preservation, flowering plants evolved to attract pollinators and cause pain to other species. Sunday afternoon I dug and hacked at the jungle. I was pleased to find tall, elegant mulleins, with leaves velvety like rabbit ears, and pokeweed -- Phytolacca americana – a source of sustenance and death. The noted ethnobotanist Tony Joe White prepared a monograph on the pleasures of poke salad in 1969. Both weeds show up as the unlikely culmination of the most exalted passage in “Song of Myself”:

“Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,
And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.”

This is from Section 5 of Whitman’s masterwork. The final three lines describe an ill-tended, gone-to-seed pasture. For him, the linkage between the hand of God and pokeweed is self-evident. All, after all, is holy. A “worm fence” is less exotic than it sounds -- a zigzag of crossed rails, forming an endless series of M’s or W’s (“Walt?” “Whitman?”) A “kelson” or “keelson” is the wooden member parallel to the keel of a ship that adds strength and stability to the structure. In Whitman’s metaphor, love lends strength to creation and holds it together in intricate unity, even the weeds.