Mu’-ha-kûm (Shoshone) or CURLY-TOP GUMWEED (Grindelia squarrosa
= "scabby, scaly, or roughened") [ click photo for next . . . ]

Muhakum is a widely-distributed, biennial to perennial native of the Sunflower family. It flowers after Summer Solstice, and has the look of being a prairie native. In Oregon, Curly-top Gumweed has been mechanically negatively selected as a wayside weed in chiefly two ways: (1) It has a two meter deep taproot which makes it highly drought tolerant; (2) Cattle leave it standing, so it now graces endless kilometers of rural roads and BLM dirt tracks throughout the Northwest. Curly-top Gumweed has thereby become one if the natives with a somewhat weedy habit that in

the shoot-first-ask-questions-later
of herbicide drunk
AG-business-sycophant
MONSANTO-tough-guy
glyphosate-happy
roadside weed-warrior's


view of the world needs to gotten rid of. Just like the army grunt out there hunting down 'terrorists' and other assorted 'bad guys' in cultures and language groups he knows nothing about, almost all the spraying I witness is equally mindless, destructive and uniformed.

A pity, I think, for if we pause a while to look more closely at the humble Muhakum, it is a very interesting plant. Notice the distinctive downward-curved phyllaries or bracts that grace the capitulum of the inflorescence. Or notice how it may be the last flower left standing in the intense heat of end of July or August. Or its many potential uses in our renewed native herbarium, such as using the leaves, fresh or dried, to prepare an aromatic if slightly bitter tea, evidently good for bronchial problems and also slightly sedative. How much better to explore these possible benefits than to continue spraying cancer left and right in such vain, violent and ignorant, attempts to control Mother Nature. The rest of the 'dumb and mute' but far more intelligent natural community will, I think, thank us. [view the video below to get an idea of the Muhakum's life-cycle....]

On the road in the Northwest of America.

Every well-made path was once only

a possibility. Because it is well-made, daily

use only makes it more beautiful.

WANDERER

Moving,
always moving, and

living inside movement. Not the
artful, cyclic, back
and forth
of the migratory birds, but
more the
discrete
stammer
of a tongue finding its way down

the tangled
streets of peregrine
words;

Not

the fountain’s smooth, continuous,
laminar flow, nor
the fractal exuberance of
white water,
but a broken movement of stops and starts,
our passageway to the wayside,
to the
travail of

these necessary crossings
of arbitrary borders...

Light. Easy.
Taking refuge among the trees.

The rhythm, of cautious walking,
a weaving
together
of the unfamiliar and half-
forgotten,
picking up songs as we go like
so many seeds
moving from home to

home on
the fur of our pants.

FIREWEED POEMS please preview
[opens in new window]

Follow @cliffcrego

Tweets by @cliffcrego

If you're a picture-poems fan, please visit my Living Water
Gallery—the best of my flowform photography w/ a selection
of quality prints & frames . . .

[ mouse over for controls / lower right fro full-screen ]