Lichen on the round stone,
Tipple of the clean water,
Litmus of sunrise, dust cloud, burn patch, gravel.

The light sound in a distant cold field,
Across the road beyond homes
Where the barrier of wild land dissolves to all land
And the breeze sound knows no difference
Wherever it blows, wherever it goes,
The architecture of circles,
The raven’s claws hanging tucked slightly in flight.
Crow call, dogs and woman I know,
Foreign as myself looking for words or names sinking
As the left-over stars of night are washed out by day coming
As a séance of silent sense and certainty.

Nothing is certain as the bright stars descend,
Turning only by perspective of our world like a personal bias.
So little we know so surely
As an instinct to hate or denigrate.
Learning seems insufficient
On the porch, in the lean to,
Fed by beans when they were wild and didn’t need anyone’s pole.
Laughing beans, season after season,
Believing earth and heaven is all there is.
Feeding us, matching us, knowing so little.
Sequestered ambrosia accessible by spinal tap and headache
Like a medicine pole or a tractor pull.

Leather hoops and straps
And the history of gynecological footrests,
All you ever need to know,
Little bear, little sprout, corn,
Pumpkin big and orange.

Waking is a vegetable scream,
Dog howl, chicken scratch, wife, husband, dough.
Illustrative of neon seen at a distance
As empty highway or distant taillights,
Storm clouds reflecting moon light.
Calligraphy of the stream,
The banks, the eye lashes of the river
Bent in concentration, concatenation,
Moans of gestation to give way,
Talk to rustle, rupture to plans,
Demonstration, documented,
Fact to turn on dementia’s elbow
Wondering where we are
Before sleep lifts her pile of clothes,
Before the sutures have healed,
Before dental work was an act of compassion
Not a brutal necessity as a stuck deer,
Still moving, showing bulge in his frightened eye.

The old guard say there is no before or after to things that
Have always been this way,
Holes, crown of unison, insanity.
All ways, this way, altogether
Fabric of grass and leaves bent round the nest
Where the moon sought the purpose first with a goddess,
On her wrist like a pearl
In the wet of wastelands,
In the emergence of nobody,
From nothing like the incessant surf where the creek
Comes down the hill talking of her stones
And the beans she heard of on the brown belt of beauty,
Statuesque, as a waterfall of her waist and
The bangles on her ankles and dew,
Everywhere the dew
Making round rainbows in our eyes
From the softening last dark
Of her moon clouds.