Trees & Flowers

So much sky

Because we canbecause we can

a new kind, our new people

this is us now
we didn't know we were here
we don't know how it happened

we flew out of their arms.

Cherry plums suck a week’ s soak,
overnight they explode into the scenery of before
your touch. The curtains open on the end of our past.
Pink trumpets on the vines bare to the hummingbirds.
Butterflies unclasp from the purse of their couplings, they
light and open on the doubled hands of eucalyptus fronds.
They sip from the pistils for seven generations that bear
them through another tongue as the first year of our
punishing mathematic begins clicking the calendar
forward. They land like seasoned rocks on the

Like words put to a song, the bunched tobacco leaves
are strung along a stick, the women
standing in the August heat for hours — since first light —
under the pitched tin roof, barefoot, and at their feet
the babies, bare-assed, dirty, eating dirt.
The older children hand the leaves from the slide,
three leaves at a time, stalks upright, three handers
for each stringer, and three more heaped canvas slides

In the Bavarian steeple, on the hour,
two figures emerge from their scalloped house
carrying sledges that they clap, in turn,
against the surface of the bell. By legend
they are summer and winter, youth and age,
as though the forces of plenty and of loss
played equally on the human soul, extracted
easily the same low bronze note spreading

1
Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother
sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph.
The sun was shining. The dogs
were sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping,
calm and unmoving as in all photographs.

I wiped the dust from my mother’ s face.
Indeed, dust covered everything; it seemed to me the persistent
haze of nostalgia that protects all relics of childhood.
In the background, an assortment of park furniture, trees and shrubbery.

Nature, which is the vast creation’ s soul,
That steady curious agent in the whole,
The art of Heaven, the order of this frame,
Is only number in another name.
For as some king conqu’ ring what was his own,
Hath choice of several titles to his crown;
So harmony on this score now, that then,
Yet still is all that takes and governs men.
Beauty is but composure, and we find
Content is but the concord of the mind,
Friendship the unison of well-turned hearts,
Honor the chorus of the noblest parts,

My garden is the wild
Sea of the grass. Her garden
Shelters between walls.
The tide could break in;
I should be sorry for this.

There is peace there of a kind,
Though not the deep peace
Of wild places. Her care
For green life has enabled
The weak things to grow.

Despite my first love,
I take sometimes her hand,
Following straight paths
Between flowers, the nostril
Clogged with their thick scent.

The deer racing across a field
of the same clay and tallow
color they are — if they are:
or are they tricks of the light? —
must feel themselves being poured
and pouring through life. We’ re not built

but become: trembling columns
of apprehension that ripple
and pass those ripples to and fro
with the world that shakes around us —
it too is something poured
and ceaselessly pouring itself.

February shakes the fields
and trembles in each yellow willow.

Mama said
it only existed in storybooks

with its soft surface
of  bluebells

but there it was
spinning so close to the earth

that it bent
every weather vane in Omaha

it was prom night

and I thought I’ d pluck a few
trumpets

to bring your Grandma

so I pulled our red ladder out
of  the garage

and climbed to the roof

I stood up
and imagined I was balancing

the moon on my head

the narrow windows of  Union
Station

gleamed like ice chips

Words torn, unseen, unseemly, scene
some far suburb’ s mall lot
Summer’ s theme: this year’ s humid
— to sweat is to know —
pen squeezed too tight yields
ink as blood or pus
so the phrase scraped, removed
offending thine eye: “Outsource Bush”
Against which, insource what? Who
will do it? Most terrible
predicate — high above mountains snow-capped
even in August in-flight motion
picture Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind infuriates many No
action, no funny, plot too