Page 48 - WTP Vol. IX #8

Susannah Lee
My Secret Herbarium
Do you know that under my bed I preserve the flora I have come to love, pressed between sheer paper flimsies
I sneak from the scriptorium. Some I snug under heavy
parchment that is festered then thinned by a flowing bath.
Such a curious process to sour the cloth into oblivion then raise it again! I have seen its flaxen shade
in the sails that wave turning into the wind.
How small they become is up to them.
Or, from time to time we curry the found skins
of arctic fox and deer who have leapt their last. These we treasure with blessings, for they hold the spin & stealth in every fibre.
So much that my pen and brush cavort & sway as music
reduces me to my tears. In prayer I ask water
to run swiftly, run pure for this will bind the world
as it softens the vellum. See how circular is my thinking! Sometimes I cannot get beyond it and pray for release...
At night I number the gifts that God has given me,
dream them here for time immemorial. Saxifrage
and Caribou moss—I ride high on the withers and remember this view for my Book of Hours, high as the fjords
who are my cousins and lash down to the sea with a daring I deeply love. In this shelter of time I tend my herbarium praising each bloom for its courage. As such I am schooled by the lichen to seek light in the most meager of places...
the brief loft of heat and the darkest indelible.
Lee’s poems were inspired by Carmelite nuns who, in the 1990s, journeyed from Ice- land to the Arctic Circle to build a monastery. An independent producer for public radio and film, Lee was a Fulbright-Hays scholar in Portugal.Her radio stories have aired on NPR, PRI and Monitor Radio, and her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Seneca Review, Sonora Review and Nine Mile Magazine.
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