Vervain and Other Poems

Travis Smith

SPRING/SUMMER 2026

Vervain

I’ll unbind my book.

It was mute anyway,

sharing etymologies

with the grass

and remembered trees.

In the brief world

that came after the world,

the blank lake and

a sky of hammered

copper talked

to each other 

when no one was looking,

or when I was.

The world and its green pages.

I never wanted to leave.

Riddle

I’m a season of ice in the verb.

I can hear bells before they’re rung.

I turn innocent again

when the water moon tells me to,

then throw it all away

into a saffron sea.

Law is just a silver ball to me;

crystal and fire

are my names for grief.

If ember and sorrel can grow in my eyes,

if the first line of this poem

comes after the last,

tell me what I am.

Orangery

I heard you crying in the orangery.

But you were so distant, the orangery

so dense with oranges that your cries

seemed to seep out of the orange itself.

I felt an old grief bend the limbs.

Each orange hung like a Bourbon on its branch.

The green leaves where they clustered could have been

the green night falling in the west—


but west means nothing to the oranges,

despite the long glass buildings built for them.

They rotate in a silent dance,

repeating orange and orangeness endlessly,


and you will never know the orangeness in you,

and you will cry, not knowing it.