Caroline Goodwin
156,330 Stellaria media Stitchwort 04-18-20 0838 PDT ※
simmered in oil or lard and then thickened with beeswax
or morning, the hatchet, the woodpile and chopping block,
balsam washing into me the aperture the moment
arriving a long stalk climbing the fence, fuzzy tip
and switch, the day reversing, the field melting away
and you returning, adder’s mouth and winterweed, you
good-for-nothing I said turn around I said what were
you thinking, mountain sage, trumpet vine, dried leaf
simmered in oil or lard and then thickened with beeswax
at the creek a quiet drumming and a refrain: it was
dawn, there were thrushes, it was rotten, there were
spaces, a somewhere brightening, an elegy, a dry stick
bowl I could crawl inside, the good old days, that
which steeped itself and you beside me and the garden
a straight path, the moment a silver blade or a birch
basket woven or a garnet, at the very least, take me back
simmered in oil or lard and then thickened with beeswax
※ This poem is one of a series. Each poem in the series takes its title from a moment's worldwide COVID-19 death count, the scientific and common name of a wild plant, and the date and time (Pacific Daylight Time) of the death count. Each poem also repeats, three times, a line of text from the book Discovering Wild Plants: Alaska, Western Canada, The Northwest by Janice Schofield.
Caroline Goodwin moved to California from Sitka, Alaska in 1999 to attend Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry. Her books are Trapline (JackLeg Press, 2013), Peregrine (Finishing Line Press, 2015), The Paper Tree (Big Yes Press, 2017) and Custody of the Eyes (dancing girl press, 2019). A recent poem, “Snaketime III”, was runner-up in The Sewanee Review’s 2019 Poetry Contest, judged by Carl Phillips. She lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.