Ode to Darnel (Ode to the Crocus)
To the early morning charge nurse Darnel who escorted me into the operating theater
where in my cornflower blue gown and goose-pimpled skin beneath a bleach-slubbed cotton
robe I was laid pugnaciously sobbing under the ignited, rotund surgical beams that blared nearly through to my core where they would cut into and discover—I swear, the air laden
with the way the scalpel approaches flashing—you are the bright stamen of a crocus on the late March morning on a Sunday while I walk my sister-in-law’s dog with her
and discuss our marriages, a thing I did not consider once before undergoing the knife except that the knife and going under might result in my death or in the discovery that I
might later die, and I have no alternative—said the doctor; he thought it could be quite true, and after a week of trying to process his words, disbelieving them even, I finally
was able to ricochet “cancer” against my spouse and absorb the return if its flail. It was just a few hours before we were to leave for the city and our son had mercifully, conclusively
fallen asleep and we held hands limply and he said we don’t fuck with cancer and I conceded his point. They could just take whatever was the woman from me.
But I insist this poem is about my love for crocus (and Darnel) and the way the flower insists upon spring the way he clutched my reluctant arm, as if come hell or high water I
would break through the rime ice, the word for which is more precise in less empirical languages. The no matter the weather, rushing the earth into and out of a season—
it’s the no-matter-whatness about the flower that I’ve always loved (and that I felt in his embrace) and if you ask me what my favorite flower is I might say a blue rose
because of the love I have for the first thing my spouse ever gave to me and what it means so many years later, the petals unworldly and ethereal and spellbindingly impossible,
but I’ve never seen one rise in the wild as does the crocus that makes my cheeks flush with its ivory velvet in delicate contrast with the blackened slush kicked across it,
the cardamom stamen brilliant against our strict winter sun, how it carries the deep glow of daylight within its cup unfurling to clutch the sun’s imperceptible emissions and guide
them into the depths of its root, and the impossibility of its presence each spring the impossibility of chlorophyll when I encounter the brilliant blossoms fully flowered
in their stocky clump. Crocus, you are tender and blooming like the sickened ovary
the oncologist plucked and bagged from my abdomen while I dreamed I was still sobbing
on the matchstick-thin steel table, while the other was freed from the sticky web of adhesions spun by endometriosis’s relentless, gangly nest that’s ruled my body since its first
menstruation. You are the uterus clipped from its stem, leaving behind the network of root,
what led to—
flowering in the vase or sliced lengthwise and flash frozen, your section beneath
the microscope of a pathologist scanned for wilt and waste, a cluster of majesty brimming
from the ground, and I tell whoever I am with even if it’s just myself of my love for crocuses and then days after: crocuses and days and days and days and then the year after
in anticipation, their arrival and the scans and then another spring and another.
The luscious purple not even anything like that of my insides, as if I could know, but saintly
and smooth and crisp and purposeful. Silk on my fingertips. The sturdiness of them. The charm. Darnel, how I loved you for simply squeezing my hand I will never forget it,
for how you nearly carried my drugged body down the corridor which seemed
like the longest and the shortest walk. The impossibility of the crocus. The impossibility
of cancer. The impossibility of kindness. The arrival sudden and clear like danger and also maybe something like conditionless love.
Excerpted from The Hungriest Stars (Persea), reprinted with permission. Read more from our conversation with the poet.
About the Author
Carey Salerno is the author of three books of poetry: Shelter, Tributary, and The Hungriest Stars. Her poems have been published in journals and magazines broadly and have recently appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, and The Harvard Review. She is the recipient of a 2025 Pushcart Prize and a 2025 Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Arts Council. Salerno serves as the executive director and publisher of Alice James Books. She also serves as a lecturer in poetry and in publishing arts for the University of Maine and is a frequent guest at residencies, and MFA and nontraditional writing programs across the country. Her essays and articles about her work as a publisher can be found in places like American Poetry Review, NPR, The New York Times, and other outlets. In 2021, she received the Golden Colophon Award for Independent Paradigm Publishing from CLMP, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, for the leadership and contributions of Alice James Books.
Related Posts
How Fierce Intensities Can Linger Within Us: A Conversation with Carey Salerno →
Fail →
On Wild Geese →
