Iridology
The wild irises are striped, blue and white, and early:
it has been too warm. I fear the frost
will cause their cells to burst, leave them
limp, toppled to the patient ground.
I want a yard full of woodland
strawberries, for them to spread further each year,
until every summer is covered in seeds.
I don’t want to catch dead flowers.
Technically, strawberries are roses. Strawberries
are not true. They will run, any chance they get.
-Annette C. Boehm (published in Westbranch)
Annette C. Boehm (she/her) is the author of two collections of poetry: The Apidictor Tapes (2022) and The Knowledge Weapon. A queer, autistic writer, she has two chapbooks available from Dancing Girl Press. She lives in Bochum, Germany. Website: annettecboehm.wordpress.com
Photo by Vickie Marschall
The New York School Diaspora (Part Seventy-One): Annette Boehm
Annette Boehm’s luminous “Iridology” begins by designating origin, pattern, and color (“wild. . . striped, blue and white”). Such stripes are sometimes called “breaks”—spontaneous outbursts, an exuberance. The addition of “early” shifts attention to the season: “it has been too warm.” Our flower watching habits have assumed worry in a climate now deranged, erratic. “I fear the frost / will cause their cells to burst, leave them / limp, toppled to the patient ground.” As her title suggests, Boehm, like James Schuyler and his “Korean Mums,” sees her flowers with both a lover’s and a scientist’s eyes.
“Iridology” suggests several things: a study of rainbows? The study of Iris, the rainbow goddess (in Spanish, a rainbow is an “arco iris”)? The study of the flower, iris? No. It’s the science of understanding the health of humans by reading their eyes—more specifically, their irises. By putting this science in charge of her poem, Boehm enlists, at a slant, its questionable powers.
She involves questions of the value or utility of looking into things, as a German researcher did by becoming the first to peer through a microscope at a human iris. The iris of the poem, it seems, is fraught with complications. Boehm wishes for something simpler, more prolific:
I want a yard full of woodland
strawberries, for them to spread further each year,
until every summer is covered in seeds.
I don’t want to catch dead flowers.
The worry expressed at the poem’s start seems to have come true, the flower embedded with the human eye and the questionable science founded upon it: “The patterns and colors of the iris have been used / to predict health, but are no reliable indicator.” In dismissing the science, the poem dismisses the flower. This is the labyrinthine logic of superstition, one of the ways we make sense of the world. Predict it. Protect ourselves from it.
There’s something freeing about leaving behind ordinary logic. It can distract us from what there is to dread: bad luck, sadness, the collapse of the natural world.
Boehm’s strawberries arrive like a cavalry to save us from all that. That they are imposters of a kind—“technically . . . roses,” “not true,” and itinerant—all the better. Refreshingly like us, “They will run, any chance they get.” Surprise can be great beauty: simplicity only increases its power. We sign on for a serious study of a doomed flower and end up in an ebullient escape: “They will run, any chance they get.” Yet this punning statement is tinged with fatality. Nature is a matter of what things “will do,” including us. We end the poem torn between lamenting and celebrating, like Hamlet‘s King Claudius “With an auspicious and a dropping eye. . . .”
Perhaps, Boehm’s willful poem suggests, this is the truth of spring. – Angela Ball
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Author: Angela Ball
