Thursday
I’ve been suffering from a severe case of poison ivy, caused by whacking weeds while wearing a short-sleeved shirt. I’ve always been highly susceptible—I was hospitalized with it once as a child—and both arms currently look like raw meat. After a week of applying every ointment I could find, I finally surrendered and went to my doctor for a shot.
My next predictable step was finding a poem or two about poison ivy. Google took me back to a speaker in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology (1914), which I hadn’t read since high school.
It’s very different reading the poems now. Growing up in a town resembling the idealized Mayberry of the Andy Griffith Show, I didn’t see the darker sides of small town life until I was a reporter on two weekly newspapers, once for the Pine City Pioneer (in Minnesota), once for the Winchester Herald Chronicle (in Tennessee). There I witnessed both the best and the worst of people, early signs of MAGA in Minnesota, cockfighting and the KKK in Tennessee.
Masters’s poems appeared as regular installments in the St. Louis literary journal Reedy’s Mirror. They came as as heady shock since many Americans shared my childhood idealization of small towns. When his characters, speaking from the grave, reveal that “real Americans” are just as capable of corrupt double dealing as those who live in cities, the country took notice. So did the town of Lewiston, Illinois, the source of the Spoon River characters, which which banned the collection for decades.
It was as if (thinking of my poison ivy scars), Masters had ripped the scab concealing the pus. A young wife who died in childbirth, for instance, exposes the lie of a happy couple:
Amanda Barker
Henry got me with child,
Knowing that I could not bring forth life
Without losing my own.
In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.
Traveler, it is believed in the village where I lived
That Henry loved me with a husband’s love
But I proclaim from the dust
That he slew me to gratify his hatred.
Another of the dead complains about his epitaph:
Cassius Hueffer
They have chiseled on my stone the words:
“His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man.”
Those who knew me smile
As they read this empty rhetoric.
My epitaph should have been:
“Life was not gentle to him,
And the elements so mixed in him
That he made warfare on life
In the which he was slain.”
While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
Graven by a fool!
It makes sense, then, that one of the graveyard residents would mention innocent-looking poison ivy.
Before turning to it, here’s another poem that mentions the plant’s misleading exterior. I stumbled across Martha Lavinia Hoffman’s “Poison Ivy” and was struck by how she admires its “graceful sprays and glossy shoots” and how its strong aerial roots clamber up “the gnarled old tree-trunks.
A Utah, California nature poet living in the second half of the 19th century, Hoffman then shifts gears and delivers her warning:
Yet beware, and think how often
Earth’s most charming loveliest things.
Hide beneath a fair exterior,
Poisonous sap, or cruel stings,
Touch not, ’tis the poison ivy;
Spurn its festooned haunt with care;
Trust not, ’tis a fair deception,
Hidden guile is lurking there.
Type of many another nature,
False, untrue, yet passing fair.
Back to Spoon River’s Calvin Campbell, a speaker who shares Masters’s view of the town. How is it, he wonders, that the air and soil of the picturesque hillside can produce both the sweet elixirs and colors that become the arbutus (the madronas or strawberry tree) and the poison that becomes poison ivy. But don’t blame Fate or Spoon River, he goes on to say, but rather “the will in you that feeds itself” and makes us dockweed, jimsonweed, dandelion or mullein—which is to say various toxic, invasive, and nuisance weeds.
Given that we have free will, why don’t we draw on the same soil and air to become jasmine or wisteria?
Calvin Campbell
Ye who are kicking against Fate,
Tell me how it is that on this hillside,
Running down to the river,
Which fronts the sun and the south-wind,
This plant draws from the air and soil
Poison and becomes poison ivy?
And this plant draws from the same air and soil
Sweet elixirs and colors and becomes arbutus?
And both flourish?
You may blame Spoon River for what it is,
But whom do you blame for the will in you
That feeds itself and makes you dock-weed,
Jimpson, dandelion or mullen
And which can never use any soil or air
So as to make you jessamine or wistaria?
I don’t blame the woods around me for producing poison ivy, just myself for not being more careful. Meanwhile, I am appalled by those people in life who hide poisonous sap “beneath a fair exterior.”
Aspire to be wisteria.
