by Tova Gabrielle
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Ode to Pickleweed; Allen Ginsberg Style...

i.

The birds bloom and plants fly,
but no one is crying
in blue grass and salt marsh,
with Ash Grass aspiring.

The watery bogs
seem to think it's still summer....
yet breezes blow cool
and the sun shines asunder.

My mind's in the mud pool
and in it are fishes
where storks down below me
pull Squigly Delisheses.

Birds in the mudflats
and ripples beyond them....
dappled and hackled,
mud-whacked and sun splattered,
with chit chat and chattering,
This world’s all in crackles.

I’m slip-shod and salted,
tired and rackled,
yet water and the wind
are not spackled or shackled.

Sun, a warm distant girlfriend,
I wish to still hold on to.
She doesn’t forget me;
she needn’t remember
no thing here reminds me
that tomorrow’s November.

ii.
a mother, a lover, lost sister, a brother.
'midst boggles of tomorrows,
I let go of these sorrows;
for here in the sunshine
the world’s just
and still mine.

The hills in the distance,
host birds
plush insistence:
stop wiggling and wriggling, a nap's the insistence;
gone silent and still, be gone yacking insistence.



iii: Pickleweed guidebook

Sing-song, crunching footsteps return me re-raveled
to Picklegrass wiggles, smallish and content-like,
not city-slick or thick lipped, money-minded or grunt-like.

"These plants make Soda Ash,"
they've glass-making doctorates
with dots like dill pickles, they're
Salt Water Vegetables,
sea-staring snipers and just slightly edible.
 
Bright Bitter side sitters, salt-sweltering settlers
Sea Salt Soda Vegetables; Prickly Pears, an iota of
benign benefactors amidst squatters and feathers, these
Sea Stalking Sleepers are tight blue-jeaned creepers



Land-locked, low-creepers and diddle-wat winkers.
Mud-marsh snifters and shiver-not peepers.
Mid-day light sleepers, amongst wakers and takers
Sun-splattered dapplegrass of giveaways and keepers.
~

Amidst blue light breezes and freckled young peepers
these "releasers of oxygen," are pocked freedom keepers.
Nodding-out hipsters, no-fuss trick-or-treaters.


Salt-glanded sea suckers. Top segments turn red and drop off like dopes
on high tide water mud beds.
Stem-soaked sunlight keepers,
Salt light and redlike they bend their red heads, like.
stemlike and twiggy, but not anorexic.
Beyond words (is the problem)!
Green-yellow puff-fingers.
tiny, beaded light fellows.
strung together with woody prickly-nots.
tiny cactuses, arms reaching directionless,
towards tweeter-tops and stork-breathing breeezes.

gathered thickly in thickets of lushness
on dry beds of mud flats and amongst rock crevices,
away and down here, spongy and ungly, weedy and watery,
dry headed and hair-tipped
"Greenish-gray pickles, strung on thin wires."
"Sea asparagus." " Swamp-fire" "Sea beans." "Poor man’s asparagus, "
converse i thne mudflats with me; how gregarious!