Maple Seed Princess
Frances Donovan
maple flowers drop
bud by delicate bud
tiny crowns
a fractal shower
I sit still beneath them
on the first warm day of spring
flowers come before the seed
I packed the princess her lunch and her bus pass
she's left me here with the memory of before
she was a princess
turning and turning in the tiny kernel
of a maple seed
delicate veins of its sail
threw her wide
into the blood-warm air
each summer the great sheltering maple
helicopters her seeds into the mulch
of my flowerbeds and hedge
I root out the tiny leaves and tiny roots
relentless they come and spread
insinuate themselves among my hedges’ roots
grow woody
how fast the weed trees grow
inside each seed an infant child waiting to be born
countless princesses who sprout
and rise and fall away again
but this one lived and grew
inside of me
in spite of me
now she’s yin and yang unyielding
off to fight city hall and litterers
she’s fiercer than I am at forty-five
remembering what happened
to the young girl that I was
the thing that was done to me
and the lie that followed—
how she said it didn’t happen
and I never told again
far away
in the lee of an oak
the princess
settles on her narrow haunches
unpacks her lunch
“They can be both a princess and a child with grubby sneakers at the same time.”
Interview by L. Valena
First of all, tell me what you responded to.
The drawing I responded to was a very finely-detailed pencil drawing of a maple seed, and the kernel had a little baby curled inside of it.
What was your first reaction to that?
I think I was struck by the fineness of the drawing. It was very light pencil work, but it was also very detailed. I also thought of an image from the TV series Fringe. In the breakaway images they would have a picture of two halves of an apple with fetuses curled inside the seeds.
Whoa.
My partner and I used to joke about apple babies. This is a like a maple baby instead of an apple baby.
What else?
I thought about potential. I thought about bringing things to fruition. The time before anything gets written down- when it's still in your mind, or it's still like a seed curled inside a kernel. It hasn't sprouted yet.
And what brought you to where you ended up?
I've been writing a series of poems about princesses. And I have a poem that I've been working on for awhile, that starts with a shower of maple flowers coming down. So I kind of wanted to relate it to that. I was thinking about how this maple tree drops down all of these seeds into my yard every year, and how I have to be very very careful to uproot all of the seedlings, otherwise they'll turn into weed trees. I've seen it happen- on my neighbor's property the hedges have trees growing out of them.
What's a weed tree?
A weed tree is a tree that you didn't plant. I mean- what's a weed? It's a very successful organism that you don't want there. Some weeds are very beautiful, and sometimes I let them grow in my garden. I have a great evening primrose that's been growing in my flowerbed for years. But, the other thing is that weeds can be invasive. One of the things that I love about my yard is that it gets a lot of sun- so if a tree is growing around it, we'll no longer get a lot of sun.
That's a very thoughtful reason to uproot a tree. Because you know that someday there will be a shade problem.
It's actually really had to find a house in the Boston area that isn't very shady. Even where we live, we don't have a lot of trees- we have that one maple in our neighbor's yard. We get some good direct sunlight, but it doesn't last all day long, because the sun goes behind other people's houses. So potential, right? But also the importance of weeding things out, which I'm never very good at. I have a tendency to let things grow until they're crowded. One could argue that's the same for my poems.
It's interesting how these little motifs just present themselves in all sorts of aspects of our lives. But this particular poem you allowed to grow, and become something beautiful. How did it start?
Well, part of it was desperation, because I realized I was coming close to my date. I love deadlines for that reason. So I started with a free-write of random associations. The point is really to keep the pen moving as much as possible, and not think about what's happening. I didn't even bother with line breaks- I think I wrote three or four pages worth of things. And then when I did my free write, I was also thinking about this previous iteration of the poem. I was thinking about what little pieces of that previous poem I wanted to keep and put into this one.
Which was the one about the maple flowers?
Yeah. It starts with maple flowers, which I only discovered after moving into this house.
These are the tiny green ones, right?
Yeah. They're tiny, and they're kind of a brownish color. Maple and oak trees both have very small flowers, and they're really quite beautiful- a fractal shower is a good term for them. They really are like little crowns. I think I tried to make a flower essence out of them one time, because maple has great energy. Maple and oak are the two most populous trees in North America. And the nice thing about maples as well, which isn't true of all trees, is they create a lot of moisture and coolness in it's shade. Some trees, like oaks, have waxy leaves, so they keep the moisture in, whereas maples have open stomata on the underneath. They put a lot of moisture and coolness into the air, which is one reason why they're so pleasant to sit under.
I've never even considered that- I had not idea that different trees have different moisture levels, it just adds a whole new dimension to things. Are trees something that interest you?
Oh, absolutely. I'd say they're pretty central to my whole spiritual framework. I see the image of a tree as a way for me to access my higher self, or my higher power, but the part of me that's centered and grounded. I really love the imagery of being grounded and rooted in the earth. Pulling energy from the earth's core but also reaching towards the sky, and pulling energy down from the sky. Being centered in between the two. I also feel really good when I hug trees. I feel so much good energy around trees, and I really want to save trees. I think so many people wander around taking them for granted, but it takes a very long time for a tree to grow, and once it does, it creates this little biosphere around it. They're host to so many different types of insects and animals, and they create a lot of benefit for the people around them.
I live in a neighborhood that's undergoing a lot of rapid development- a lot of people want to live there right now. There was a big parcel of property nearby that had these beautiful trees- they were probably a hundred years old, that hadn't been maintained. This guy came in and wanted to just cut down all the trees and divide the parcel into six units and put two-story townhouses on each one. Fortunately, because the land is somewhat historic, the neighborhood was able to come together and negotiate with him. But we still lost a beautiful old beech tree. These English beech trees- they're enormous, bigger than houses. And there was one on this property that unfortunately had a disease, because nobody had maintained it. And then there was also a beautiful Tulip Tree and some old growth maples, and an oak- a lot of them had to be taken down because they hadn't been maintained. This is something I didn't know about trees, they really need to be taken care of. They need to be pruned and looked after. We have an apple tree that we've sunk a lot of money into on our property. But it's wonderful to have it there. When you love a tree, it does love you back.
Those relationships with trees are special, and can be hard to find in the city. It's worth holding onto. Tell me more about princesses.
There were a couple of things that struck me. I'm working on a manuscript- it's my first book-length manuscript. I'm in the middle of an MFA program right now- I'll be finishing up in a few months. I was looking to do a series of poems, because I've found that when you do a series it gives you a steadiness and momentum that you don't get if you're just working on individual poems. I wanted to explore the archetype of the princess, and really push the envelope on it in all kinds of ways. The poems I've been writing haven't been about pink, cotton candy fluff princesses, they've been about dirt princesses, and manic episode princesses.
Oh, I want to read that one.
The other thing that struck me was a video recording of my niece, when she was quite young- I think she was two or three years old. She was old enough to be speaking, but definitely in that stream of consciousness way that young children have. She was telling her mother all of these stories about princesses. And the princesses were doing all sorts of things, that when you think about historically what princesses actually did, which was mostly go to parties and wait to be married and hopefully produce an heir, these princesses were very active. They were going on adventures. I was on the train home from work, and there were two girls dressed in their princess dresses. Princess dresses weren't really a thing when I was a kid, or at least they weren't a thing among the people that I knew. But what strikes me about young girls playing as princesses, is they don't care about getting dirty. They don't care about wearing dainty shoes. They can be both a princess and a child with grubby sneakers at the same time.
That's a cool confluence of things that doesn't really exist in the adult world. Either we're dressed up, or trying to pass as a higher status person than we feel we are on the inside, or we're in the muck, in grubby clothes.
I like that melding. There were two poems I wrote about princesses- one of which was the poem that eventually evolved in the maple seed poem. And the other was about those two princesses on the train. I was trying to compare that to what I thought a princess was when I was that age. The problem with memory is that it deceives you- every time you remember something you rewrite it all over again.
What else do you have to say about this poem?
It's no done- I think it needs some more trimming. I've revised it a little bit since I sent it in to you. I had poet friend who I trust very much suggest that I stick with the lyricism, rather than getting into the memory stuff. I'll have to think about that- I'm not sure it's what I want. Sometimes I take suggestions and run in the opposite direction.
It's like flipping a coin.
Right. But when you get that kind of feedback it means that something needs to change to make it more unified- you can't just say screw your advice. It tells you that something still needs work. The memory piece- when the narrator gets into something that happened thirty years ago- is the part where the poem gets weighed down. I feel like it's the most important part of the poem, and if I cut that out I would be cutting out the heart of the poem. The basic argument of the poem is that the speaker is rooting out these seedlings, and in a sense rooting out these memories. But this one part of her has flourished- this memory has flourished and changed in spite of it, and has become something quite different.
A weed tree.
Yes. But a weed tree can be beautiful too.
Right- a weed tree is only a weed tree until you decide that it's what you wanted in the first place.
Exactly.
Are you comfortable with where the poem is for publishing, even though you may edit it further in the future? Almost as a snapshot of the progression of this poem?
People say that a poem is never finished, it's just abandoned.
That's kind of negative, isn't it? You don't have to abandon it if you feel done with it, right?
Yeah, it's probably a little extreme.
Do you have any advice for someone else doing this?
I would say start by just putting pen to paper, or doing motion, or whatever the basic building block of your craft is. Do it without thinking about it. I think every artist knows that's the essential part. For me, I need to let go of the idea that anyone is ever going to read what I write. Yes, the audience matters, yes the reader matters, but only in rewriting. When you let go of that idea, of what other people are going to think, that's when the really interesting stuff happens. I think one thing that makes art and creativity so powerful is getting into the flow state. It can take awhile to get into the flow state. The thing about the flow state- aside from that sense of motion happening through you, is that you're not self conscious about what's happening- you're just letting it happen. As a writer, that means putting pen to paper. A ten minute free write is usually good for me, as a poet. I think that prose writers tend to go for longer, because they need to. But with poetry you're doing something a little different.
It's amazing to me how many artists I talk to- it doesn't seem to matter what medium they express themselves with in the end, a lot of people start with free writing. I think it's really interesting- it says something about how our minds work.
There's something else I've also started doing- I've been drawing almost before I write. Sometimes it just very abstract- curves on the page. For years and years I was using composition books, but recently I've been using big sketchbooks. Drawing any kind of an image is a different way into writing.
Call Number: Y24VA | Y27PP.doMa
Frances Donovan's chapbook Mad Quick Hand of the Seashore is a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards. Publication credits include Snapdragon, Oddball Magazine, and SWWIM. She once drove a bulldozer in a GLBTQ+ Pride Parade while wearing a bustier.