Green
I could dredge every ocean with my mouth
And drink nothing more than my own reflection.
I could commune with the oracular
Grasses and see only air, solid as death.
I have spent too long repairing people
With fistfuls of my own mortality.
I could have made an ark from those lost pieces
But instead I had the arrogance to think
I would float anyway, dipping my hands
Into marrow and hammer-fire
To stretch the trachea of others
Into chalices and fill them with light,
As if the human need to scream was defeated.
I have splintered by bones to write their names
On telegraph poles and phone boxes.
At least the clavicles have grace enough
To lock our hearts.
At least the skull has mercy enough
To cage our dreams.
I now stand bloody-handed at the font,
Begging for green analogies to darn
The holes into the likeness of men
Or beat them into lines of poetry.
Look to the coppice and bleed, fool.
I have given too much of myself to this world.
It is not the pears we need to mourn,
But the breaking of the branches.
To eat those fruit is to feed on nothing
But the hungering pull of gravity.
Every goshawk is a line of history
Mastering the wind.
Every cutworm is the emperor
of its own language.
Make an orchid of my ego and see how
Beautiful a parasite can be.
Make a transcript of the sky and perhaps
It will say something like:
“A bird can eat a seed but it cannot love a flower”
