Common exotic, persistent ephemeral—
no way to describe them without contradiction:
June to September, frilly, pastel-purple ruffs
ring the cone-shaped flowerheads—over the season,
hundreds, even thousands, of minuscule blossoms
on each head. They open a few dozen
at a time. Each lasts
just one day.
Flowering done, the man-tall spiney stalks
turn woody, stand through the winter.
Long after the grasses
have lain down, they remain—
gaggles of ditch-dwellers, their drab
ermined with frost.
You’d know them anywhere. Spread
from Old World to New, they thrive
nationwide, outcompete the native plants
that native wildlife need for food. Still, it’s hard
not to admire how their paired, stalk-clasping leaves
cup and hold water to draw on in drought,
hard, even here, on the edge of a refuge,
not to welcome their distinctive, familiar forms.
—
Eleanor Berry’s latest poetry collection, Works of Wildfire, won the 2022 Grayson Books Chapbook Award. Previous publications include Green November (Traprock Books, 2007), No Constant Hues (Turnstone Books of Oregon, 2015), and Only So Far (Main Street Rag, 2019). A past president of the Oregon Poetry Association and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, Berry holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and has taught at colleges and universities in Wisconsin and Oregon.
