November 2021
/By November, autumn’s giddy, gaudy glory has been spent. The remnants of October spill about us, damp and faded, like discarded streamers after the last party guest has left. November is the month of drudgery, of dimming light, of grim acceptance; and - perhaps, because of this - it is the month of remembrance, of reflection, of gratitude.
Bittersweet
for Barbara Trainer
by Anastasia Vassos
As if the matriarch who died last year
could hear her, Barbara says sorry, Andree
as we hack away at the Oriental Bittersweet.
It’s clung to the porch’s iron railing
for fifty years. Its little orange capsules hold
red seeds that will never take hold
because of our necessary task.
We make our saddest effort cleaning up
the garden for winter. Yesterday, we pitch-forked
the pile of wood chips at the top of the hilll,
moved them down the path to the hollow
barrow by barrow, almost as far as the bridge.
Behind our backs, the red maple in the center
of the yard had dropped her yellow skirt.
The bittersweet won’t grow back -
we’ve made sure of that - it’s invasive,
non-native, and we’ve hacked it down
to its stubby root. But the iris that we split,
rhizomes bleached in a ten
percent solution, will take hold
once spring comes, and push their spathes
toward the sun, standards blazing, beards
almost psychedelic in their insistence.
Such is the stubbornness of nature.
She plays dead, then comes back to life
like Lazarus, who could not stay
underground for more than four days
before he was revived.
The poems of Anastasia Vassos appear in RHINO, SWWIM, Rust+Moth, Thrush Poetry Journal, Comstock Review and elsewhere. She is the author of “Nike Adjusting Her Sandal” (Nixes Mate, 2021). Her chapbook “The Lesser-Known Riddle of the Sphinx” was named a finalist in Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. She is a Best of the Net finalist, and reads for ,Lily Poetry Review, speaks three languages, and is a long-distance cyclist. She lives in Boston.
More information about Nike Adjusting Her Sandal, in which “Bittersweet” is included, is available at the following links:
https://nixesmate.pub/product/nike-adjusting-her-sandal-%c2%b7-anastasia-vassos/
