The Bluestone Review 2020

The Bluestone Review 2020

Poetry

Burdock (for Peter) By Matthew J. Spireng To some, this might seem a fable if I were to say two couples came out of a cave where burdock grew near the entrance, though that was how it happened that you learned about burdock. It was a tall plant, so I didn’t have to bend to pluck the seed pods near the top—seven, I think. I placed them together in my hand and showed you the ball of green pods, passed it to your hand. I was amazed you knew nothing of burdock, so familiar from my childhood—browned pods of autumn clinging to my pants, or worse: mats of burdock and hair on the poor dog so we couldn’t pull them out, had to cut the hair to free him. I could look up who it was had the genius to realize the little hooks on the burdock’s pods’ spines that allowed them to cling so tenaciously could be reproduced as something useful: Velcro. Doubtless it was someone who as a child had observed burdock closely and to whom the memory of that nuisance plant had clung so it made him or her rich off the patent. I remember how sometimes as kids we’d pluck the pods and fling them at each other so they’d stick to each other’s clothes. Now, years later, I wonder what you did with that ball of pods I handed you that you wanted to keep after we’d left the cave where the poetry reading was. Don’t toss them in the garden, I warned, and you, in turn, warned Susan. Burdock, a curse of the pasture—persistent, ubiquitous. How could you never have known it? And now you’re stuck with it for life.

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