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Wild Laurel
by J. C. Todd
I
A clasp opens. Mother’s pearls
click on a concrete floor,
held in a seahorse curve by silk string.
One pearl, least of the descension,
has cracked into jagged halves,
small fruit split by a fall. It opens
off the strand, interior tinted
as if by a spot of pink blood
that sometimes is released
from an infant’s vagina.
Where is the grain that began it,
irritant the pearl has grown to enclose?
II
In a washroom’s half-steamed mirror,
a girl on the verge, her childish smile
a renunciation of the aureoles
blushing under a camisole of nylon.
She bends above a washbasin,
leg raised, foot on the faucet,
torso stretched over it, shaving.
Her flanks are ivory bathed
in the pink of water in which
strawberries have been rinsed.
She shines as though glazed
by her own wet breath.
Rousing in shadows, a boy
whose upper arms and chest
burgeon with the bulk of
early manhood, whose T-shirt
is brilliant milk against jet skin,
its undertone of bitten plum.
Slowly his palms come to rest
on the crest of the girl’s pelvic ridges,
bony grab bars of sex; his curls,
dense as club moss, rest
in her hair’s pale waver — cornsilk
drifting from a split husk
III
Into the harsh white of the washroom —
uninhabitable — a scent erupts,
heady and damp, the acidic musk
of forest floor, coppery with needles
cast from conifer, soil
that laurels root in, that feeds
their wild and fragile blooms.
IV
Soon after candletime, when pines
push new tips sunward, late in June,
just as summer shifts from promise
to performance, on the second day
of ruby-throats and laurel bloom,
while camping on a wooded northern face
near the crest of Pinchot Ridge, I woke
to what has become last blood,
a stain like rust on a leafstalk.
Is this how worlds change,
one element transforming another?
How what is rooted, earth-bound
takes to air, borne by spore.
Between my legs a new scent —
chapatti, kavli, bread without yeast,
yet sporish, as if the vigorous mold
of physical decline
had cultivated new growth,
as if something young
had sprung from decay,
like the foxfire, bloodroot,
the shy monkshood
that thrive in the mulch of fallen laurel,
fragrant flourishes of shade.
V
Shadowy undergrowth
the thigh leads to and from,
sanctum whose gate
the undergrowth conceals,
moon-timed ovaries
that drop into the sanctum
the cell that settles and feeds
and the cell that is expelled,
these and the mind are one,
joined in a biosphere
of memory and fission
whose permeable boundary
is two yards square of skin.
Oh, wild and fleeting
laurel that blossoms and falls,
body that flowers and fades,
Oh, shade.
Section IV appeared as “After Candle Time“ in Runes, A Review of Poetry, 2005.
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Bio: J. C. Todd’s poems and translations have appeared in the anthology Shade 2004,
and in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard
Review and other journals. Pine Press published two chapbooks: Nightshade (1995) and Entering
Pisces (1985).
Awards include a fellowship in poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, two awards for poetry from
the Leeway Foundation, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts international artist exchange fellowship to
the Schloss Wiepersdorf colony in Germany, a scholarship to The Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators
in Sweden, and a stipend from the Latvian Cultural Capital Foundation. Her poems have received five Pushcart
Prize nominations.
She is an associate editor for the poetry web magazine, The Drunken Boat
(www.thedrunkenboat.com), where she
has edited special features on contemporary Lithuanian and Latvian poetry in translation, and she was guest
poetry editor for the Summer, 2005 issue of The Bucks County Review, and co-editor of “Recurrence
in Another Tongue: Poets Translating Poets” that appeared in Frigate 4 in 2003.
A lecturer in Creative Writing and in the Writing for College program at Bryn Mawr College, she has an MFA
from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
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