If I Drink the Violets,

 

you must hold the glass,

in case I become a fever of absence.

In my old version of creation,

 

our cosmos was birthed by another cosmos.

Which makes me fortunate, otherwise Johnny Rotten

would never have let me on his bus,

 

and I’d still be looking at my watch hours later

in tall fall grass, waiting for you to come.

The wheat aches for me

 

to run through it, tossing off jacket, pants, tee,

the bikini that slipped to show a nipple.

As for scissors, I’m never without them.

 

Round is the lip of glass, the pocked orange,

beautiful blue Neptune.

Show me a crazy overnight,

 

like the one where I lost at poker, and you

showed me your glittering icebergs.

The cosmos is still tumbling

 

its spent fireworks, blowing confetti

under our door. Even though you showed up so late,

I forgive you

 

your muddy Doc Martens,

looking at me

with your violets like that.

 

 

What Did the Lichen Whisper?

 

Something about tardigrades, something about dew.

Sometimes the soul lives like a weed in the dusk-dark

world between red-breasted sapsucker at the weeping

 

crab apple and the moon shell in the planter amongst chives

and early spring mums. Show me your mollusk heart

I say to the sea, and why is it impossible to love the dead

 

when they no longer call? Sometimes I sharpen my pencils

so often the eraser remains, or maybe the crossword

was Monday every day. The lichen in the bag in the box

 

was waiting for the dye pot. Lung wort, bark barnacle,

fringed moon, Methuselah’s Beard. And what about moss,

or how the wren sings long solo tones so spaced apart?

 

Death song, winged minnow, pretty curl, sheep’s teeth.

And who names where the junco lives, the hairy and downy

woodpeckers? Last night the coyotes sang a song

 

I’d never heard, perhaps a dirge, or maybe a ballad

to what bleeds between their teeth. Sometimes I haven’t lived

long enough to lose wonder, and often I lose the moon

 

behind the Douglas firs, the hemlocks, the alders.

Who needs to dig a grave when bones are more easily eaten

above ground? No antlers remain in the forest, for the mice

 

have had their fill. In the dream Eden teases, the lizard

on the path circles its legs like a cartoon in its slow

hurry to make the safety of the moss on the other side.

 

Something about a song, or a wing, or how the lung fills

with spring, how breath repeats itself, changing its tune

as it goes along.

 

NIGHT