Vox Populi
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Gary Fincke: The Doctrine of Signatures
The woman who followed me from flower
To flower said Birthday? Anniversary?
And I shook my head among the arrangements
Until she shifted to Accident? Sickness?
Guiding and pointing and introducing
The Doctrine of Signatures, how all plants
Were created to serve us, their powers
To cure revealed by shape, by size, by shade:
The bloodshot blossoms of the eyebright
Heal pinkeye; the Chinese lantern plant
Is bladder-shaped for stones. Paracelsus,
She said, acknowledging the source, adding
Yellow plants for the liver, ginseng root
For general malaise, prescriptions
So simple we could arrange eternity
In a greenhouse if we knew the shapes
Of our weakest parts, my mother’s heart
Winding down while I thought of petals
Red and sugared as a lover’s gift.
And since then I’ve comparison-shopped
For pancreas, thyroid, lymph glands, walking
The aisles with such ignorance of form
I might as well choose a shape for the soul—
Lilac, lily, morning glory—as if
Resurrection could be watered and fed
While we search for the flowers which form
Like tumors, the buds which open into
The ominous mass on the x-ray,
And the seeds or spores that are scattered
Like great seasonings for the earth, blended
So perfectly they lie invisible
Until they rise from our astonished tongues.
~~~
~~~
Gary Fincke is the author of over two dozen works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His poetry has won numerous awards, including the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine.
Poem copyright 2024 Gary Finke
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Oops. Forgive double colon. Haven’t had coffee yet ( but Tashi had her walk)
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This morning so far: in my morning drink: Madagascar cinnamon for level blood sugar, pepper and turmeric, trying a new coffee with lion’s mane and chaga mushrooms. Not as many herbs as I used to take.
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Excellent choices, Barbara!
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I love this poem so much! Every word of it. The poem expresses the plenitude of creation and do its own plenitude is beautifully fitting. I love the feeling of wonder and fear the plant images, their rich names, and the likened body parts offer me. A feast of words!
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I should add I studied Renaissance literature so the Neoplatonism this medical lore is based on is familiar to me. I’ve always thought it provided fertile ground for period’s richly metaphoric poetry and drama. Or, chicken and egg, which came first.
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Yes, a feast of words.
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10//13Hi Maria–Read the poem? So-so, a little wordy, but be sure to go through the pictures just below the poem. Very clever! (& true!)
Raining today, glad I got the laundry in yesterday. Lots of birds at the feeder, all the regular gang (10 species so far) & 2 black squirrels who haven’t checked out the bird feeder …… yet.
Have to work on my “list” today— so slow, but I’m ever hopeful I will get to the bottom of it all one day. Think I have to turn on the heat to help me get started — wet & cold brrrr~~Susan
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My library has so many herbals and I have given so many away Some espouse form and function. And oh the roses and their meanings. So much of not believing and suspending belief.
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Eva, my wife, is a dedicated herbalist. When I was ill recently with shingles/covid/thrush, her teas helped me a great deal…
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Wild cherry bark was a favorite herbal of Pam’s. And many the times she and I roamed the woodland trails gathering Plantain for her salves. Both helped me and others with different ailments. But she was also careful in her work.
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The juxtapositions and imagery of the poem are worth savoring, both poetically and theologically, or so says my left brain. Sean Sexton and others have brought up these nuances well.
My life-partner was a member of the local Herbalist Guild, but none of them practiced signatures, so far as I know. And when Deadly Nightshade or Black Snakeroot appeared in our garden, there was no talk of them being healing gifts from God. She had me root them out.
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Our culture has largely lost our connection with the plant world. Tens of thousands of years of knowledge lost…
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What a poem! Such a perfect cadence, tension, tone! Impossible not to go on reading it and reading it, as i takes us into all its wonderful similes, and, as you say so well Michael, those correspondences. I didn’t know about that doctrine — and how fabulous its content is (as in containing many fables)!
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I love Gary Fincke’s dark vision… so true, profound and terrible…
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What a fabulous concoction and music pouring through!
The suspicious beast we are and have ever been—assigning everything including God’s love and attention to our just dessert or lack thereof. Its a perfect poem of the medieval heart still beating in all humankind. None of this will survive such a world. All of this will survive such a world. I’m certain and the poem makes me ever more, both things are true.
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Thanks, Sean. I love how the poem takes a medieval principle of nature’s design and transform it into a way the speaker experiences the world.
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A music of correspondences…
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it is indeed fabulous how it does that! Thankyou for all this every day. So glad I knew you when…
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