Ars Botanica
To bear you in mind.
To be jammed in your saffrons.
The abasement of these ditches
of your smolderings.
Of your abasement.
Follow this in:
we go weatherward?
is this tenable?
The roothairs fuse
for the openings
to shoot from.
You leaf
on the potentate's dome?
You remnant
in need of finishing?
You gilt
and swift execution?
Black Maple
struck of a gold
no a citrine
volt that this is
it's so real
is the must
is the brachia
unreachable
is the leaf
is the breakaway
of a house
on a ground
is the site
which is godless
Geomantic
Spruce of the dark
Ontarian orchards,
spoor of the interior,
I emerge into uncalculated
grain shattering at the crown.
As the sky answers
against the watercourse,
so I take my few
exceptions with God.
Nothing so irredeemable
as the robber cowbird,
as the slump of the fisher
unraveling its host.
The great brains of the beeches
divest themselves so sparingly.
I will outstay everything
for the seasonal observance.
Dried silicles, dried bracts
of the impeccable edge work.
Cords of the drainages in ice.
The rose's roadside stigma.
Black tongues massed
at the interstices,
the lone pioneer oak
attends its assemblage of galls.
Houses Among Us
Houses among us.
Houses making the fields
grow leathery at dusk.
Who are the rivers.
Who are the passageways
outbranching from the common
antique vestibule the same
as it is in heaven.
A wall that is leaning afterward.
A clawfoot tub that holds
itself like a boar
giving birth in a basement.
A house inside you
beat of tin.
A house inside me
stiff with clove.
Nonesuch
You come from unquiet
country into rooms
the marshes empty to
at low tide. Region
of seed kind. Its terraces
secreted in rivers.
The implicate system
you live in or that which is
all the while here unrenders
itself, a civility
of capture and let run.
You are wondrous
in a fundament of greens.
Unknown but you are.
The Keep
Is this a kind of progress? This slip-bead
morning through which the rains keep
missing only the scarcely illuminated tread
of clover at the heels of swart pines. Sleep
counters me both ways. I fail to advance
in my own precession by the dark
calendar needles. I will not advance
but by the strange calamities that work
as on shallops on calmed water, a slow
going nowhere kind of motion toward
centermost. You are not here. Below
not borne by branches. You are not that bird,
so rigged as to catapult free
as if I'd the will you would change me.