It was named after the ship’s Admiral, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, and it usually crawls along the porch frames or borderlines the windows of bedrooms, transforming dingy frame bungalows like a mistletoe of summer. Angelenos pronounce it almost Spanish-like without the lovely trill of Ls. And this morning we look up where it came from and hear this story about the first European who found it on exploration in 1769, 2oo hundred years before Woodstock. A botanist, who was also a woman, snuck aboard a ship disguised as a man, flowing through the drab spaces and corridors where women weren’t allowed. The galley, the botany, the discovery. Jeanne Barē, the first woman at the circumstance of bougainvillea, the first one to circumnavigate, to circumvent the world.
Napowrimo 2017: This is the penultimate poem! I’m exhausted! Pick a noun from one of your favorite poems (I picked “Seranade” by Billy Collins) and write a poem around it.