Poem of the Week

Pearly Everlasting

Alissa Quart

after James Schuyler’s “The Bluet”

“Don’t pick the apples” reads

the sign, tempting like this

island’s algaeic beaches,

elegiac ponds. Pearly everlasting

flowers under the black sky.

Ovoid red leaves descend on us,

berries poisonous, as on an outdoors

reality show. They call this

“survivorship,” even in an Eden

that’s shades of medieval

tapestries. Seasonality a luxury

good in a country

that’s a chaotic centrifuge,

woods around me

the yellow of Grey Poupon.

Today’s seaside town

is regimented clapboard.

I’m trapped in a dream

of childhood and violence, as I am

trapped in so much beauty.

Our sleep’s bogeymen now alive,

creeping through newscasts, clumps

of disinfo. A father throwing

a colander is the president.

Queen Anne’s lace: royalty

in the dirt, where we grow

and will be buried. Pearly

everlasting waits to be

dried, troubling the line

between plant and bloom, vased,

its blossoms splaying palely,

metonyms for other loss.

The Yale Review · “Pearly Everlasting” by Alissa Quart

what surprised you about the composition of this poem?

As I wrote this poem, I was reading more atypical nature poetry—James Schuyler’s 1974 poem “The Bluet,” for instance—as not just nature poetry but ecopoetics. Like the bluet, pearly everlasting is a modest wildflower, plain yet affecting and also drought-tolerant, making it a good metaphor for political and personal survival. Through writing the poem, I recognized that my passion for weeds and stems is more than a hobby: they are unto themselves a form of poetry.

Alissa Quart is the author of the poetry books Monetized and Thoughts and Prayers and nonfiction titles including Bootstrapped and Squeezed. She directs the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Her poems have appeared in Granta, LRB, The Nation, and other outlets.

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