Science and Alchemy Debora Greger (bio) Letter to a Young Man of 1776 William Bartram (1739-1823) Dear Sir, Of the revolution that ragedin the colonies, you found nothing to say.Over thirty, Quaker, son of a manwho, as he readied another cask of plantsto ship from Philadelphia to London,wondered would you ever amount to anything— he sent you south to collect more species,a trip not put to paper for a decade,till what you recalled was leaves, more leaves,and an alligator battle to find a mate.How the romantics loved that flowered prose,Coleridge slumping over it in a stupor,Wordsworth taking Travels through the Carolinasto Germany, the closest he came to the South . . . how long did I sit in the twenty-first centuryat the old Linnaean Library?The man I had arranged to meet in Londonhad not arrived. I was offered sweetsso British I couldn't name them,the remains of a Christmas party. Too grand for it not to be the eighteenth century,science still abed with alchemy next door,the room looked down on me.Snow wove its lace against long windowsthat searched the parking lot for something [End Page 194] a man could tie someone's name to.Stiffly on a stiffer chair, I sat,a North American weed not yet classified.I didn't recognize myself. Sixty, married a week, I had just saidthe words my husband for the first time,to explain my presence in that great hall.I had not taken his name, just the ring.On my left hand, I felt the weightof the silver as it warmed to me. Surplus Poem Solitudinem fecerunt, pacem appelunt —Tacitus In the corner of Basin Surplus, a snake of ropecoiled in wait: thick as the arm of the eight-year oldI would turn into next week, it gathered dust—no, that took effort. In the heat it knew a quarterburned a hole in my pocket: the week's allowance.What did I have to tie up, anyhow, but the babyMother had brought home? Wasn't one brother enough? IIBayonets detached from their guns, canteens filled with airwrung dry by some other desert— where was my father [End Page 195] after the war? As if from a trench, he peered over a bankof mutant trigger-finger mittens. Only he could seean entrenching tool digging for clams— if we drove to the coast. Downwind from the reactor baking a fresh batchof weapons-grade plutonium, we made a desertout of family and called it peace. Complaint of a Song Thrush King of the alley that runs behind England,I sing what you can't see:here lies all you cast out like devils;there a rat feeds on the garbage of heaven.From the top of a tree no one planted—the one you call trash, for want of its name—I smooth the air, lord of all I survey,beak pointing to the Arctic wind.I do not sing your garden snail or his lies.I pound his shell on a rock and feast—but not yet. The epic journey of a daygoes nowhere, at great length, as Homer proved.How can you sleep? Sing the vestment of frostand the soul's dainty trail of slime,pearly under the Morning Star. NovemberI translate from Anglo-Saxon gravelto the mud of Estuary English.Medlar and sloe sweeten like song in their decay. [End Page 196] Debora Greger Debora Greger's most recent book of poems is By Herself (Penguin, 2012). She is poet-in-residence at the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida. Copyright © 2013 Debora Greger