Damn if it didn’t start with
yarrow—stalks harvested under the towering Sangre de Christo mountains, cut for use casting the I Ching;
then it proceeded to
culvert—piping rainwater under the road upstream from the Prescott house, it’s clogged with debris and when a flood comes it washes down the road and through my yard. It’s definitely not a conduit although it does guide flows; then there are
tamales—they snuck in there somewhere between the known, tortillas, and the next mental blank:
box elder—the trees that shade campsite #12 in Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, and that host those weird black-and-red (western) boxelder bugs.
Let’s try this again, commit to Latinized memory:
Achillea millefolium
tandem tabernus
Ferculum Mesoamericanum ex masa, farinam ex segete nixtamalizato, quod vaporetur in folliculo grani vel fixa folium.
Acer negundo quod exercituum Boisea rubrolineata
recalling, naming what routinely … cannot be brought to mind.