No place for hothouse blooms. A thrush whistles its bright sequence
therefore, morning once more. I’ve turned down the news.
A riot in the peppered overgrowth
near-naked pink clover fronting a hill. There’s a basketful of heads
flicked off,
a tumbril for carting away rebellious proles.
The obvious, at times a lie.
The war flower skirts a victory garden, leaves a pollen smear,
this beauty richer when it goes without, though my hand’s been sought
in a stained collusion.
A betrayal of what makes its bed unbidden, rife.
Here’s balm for heart disease, nectar cup for long-tongued bees.
The dead say
this is a question of influence—yours or ours.
I crawl around the weeds, trying to find the lucky sprig dropped carelessly
as if it would cry out. Her skirt hem swings wide of the wheelbarrow
while she earnests this small field, sunburnt across neck and chest.
To follow in emulation, such a simple thing. Her hair bound, a Roman matron
stooping. I am earning my keep.
It’s now the hoppers rise up between taut blades, disturbed
and thumbnail-sized spring toads, skin like dampened clods, scatter in the wind.
I want to say
I’ve been displaced, that the sweated sugar in crushed stems smells of loss,
that I have slept in clover to a saintly hum, bees uncurling from their sticky cells.
One note, bending under pressure of the fret—
thrush again. All morning
island fog has darkened the sun; needs to rain. There will be an interval
a suspension in which nothing pleads its case.
