Trees & Flowers

Sunflowers

No, nor a fierce hurrah
for what it does without choice,
for following the light
for the same reason the light follows it.

Just a thing rough to the touch, a face
like a thousand ticks turning their backs,
suckling at something you can’ t see,
and a body like a tag off the earth

so that my child hands couldn’ t tear it out
from the overgrown lot next door.
My palms raw with the shock
of quills and spines. Its hold like spite, and ugly

Letters to Walt Whitman

I

I hear you are whispering there O stars of heaven,
O suns — O grass of graves...
If you do not say anything how can I say anything?

Let us tunnel

the air
(as a mole’ s green galleries)
toward the ultimate

cornfield
— the square of gold, & green, & of tassle

that rustles back at us —

let us burrow in
to a susurration, the dense starlings,

of the real —
the huge
sunflowers waving back at us,

as we move

— the great grassy world

that surrounds us,
singing.

At the End of My Hours

I

here I’ m here I’ m here I’ m

here here here here cricket

pulse — the katydidic tick

(and then a pause) tick

(and then a pause) in greening trees — tales

of a gratitude for water, the hollyhock’ s

trumpet Yes, Tenderness

her glove and hoe — her bad trip

love/grief, her medic tent

talking me down, kissed fissures

in the world’ s despair, what I’ d

loved — alive for a while — a day called

Rip and Brood, a day called

Glorious Hour, the long hunt and the worm found

Delirium

Such green, such green,
this apple-, pea- and celadon,

this emerald and pine and lime
unsheathed to make

a miser weep, to make his puny
bunions shrink; these seas

and seas of peony, these showy
tons of rose

to urge a musted monk disrobe,
an eremitic nun unfold;

such breathy, breathy moth
and wasp, such gleeful,

greedy bee to bid
the bully hearts of cops

and bosses sob,
to tell a stubby root unstub, a rusted

hinge unrust, the slug unsalt;
to stir the fusted

Alas, Kind Element!

Then I was sealed, and like the wintering tree
I stood me locked upon a summer core;
Living, had died a death, and asked no more.
And I lived then, but as enduringly,
And my heart beat, but only as to be.
Ill weathers well, hail, gust and cold I bore,
I held my life as hid, at root, in store:
Thus I lived then, till this air breathed on me.
Till this kind air breathed kindness everywhere,

Unravelling / Shock

A hole torn in the fabric of the world,
the web, the whole infernal weave
through which live-giving rain is falling
but mixing with the tears and with the blood.
Dead body-snatchers enter, the mega-corpses,
much in the news these days, enter and grind
bones, flesh and sinews down to dry tree bark,
mixing with tree bark, crawling with the demonic
beetles. They’ ll tell it later: “No one expected this”:
not one — patient, doctors, practitioners
of every stripe, no one except the one whose daily

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