PLANT


In a fraction of our being
In the timber of the world
The uncertainty principle

The child smells the ethics of a flower. Its calyx sounds depth of enfolded cosmos. The ethics demands sacrifice. Catapulted reusable oxygen released by a flower on a foreign species. The peeled waves of a flower’s breathing.

In the silent warring of flowers, the child hears the sentience of scant mineral resources. What does the flower know but absorbable nutrients? the sway of sunlight and moonlight? the aqueous fray of flapping butterfly? the steam of a polished bee? In the open air, the ethics of a flower is its fragile bloom. The gust of wind that rips through pistils leaves bare stems ragging nature’s riches. And the commodities of a flower—six carbon dioxide molecules, six water molecules—making things with air.

Her world is timed and shaped like a magnificent ball.
You see through the end, the rust in a bird’s claw (for a hawk flowerbeds are needed)
A beautiful artistic invention
Clouded in dying stare
The stems and lullabies of swaying flowers
In steep yellow meadows
Daffodils in people’s poems
And folding crocus in the word edge

A man eating flowers out of grief or hunger
The pulse of larkspurs in summer knells  
The merits of quince blossoms
“I don’t know anything about hands” (says the child).
Snapdragon on moon’s lace
The fragrance of waxy white flowers
Stephanotis and such
“Be careful what you call tree.”
Four years of nursing before it yields fruit
And meanwhile all this space to look on
Feeble air to breathe

“This paradoxical intrinsic quality of existing with respect to something missing, separate, and possibly nonexistent is irrelevant when it comes to inanimate things, but it is a defining property of life and mind.”

All the nothings that make me are here
In the ballooning receptacles of organic processes
In my bending forward inspecting
The first creeping sprig
In the arid mantles of winter
My entelechy a vibrating aura
Of invisible segregations
Of which I become poorer and stealthier
As I move through in body
Of motion and decay

Absence smears life on my flesh

+++

THING


Covered in animal fur
Pheromones leaving squid-ink trail
But a thing resists

In the still movement of an object
Haunted by specks of dust
And invisible saliva spit
Of multiple vocabularies

The thing within ornament
Watches the glaze of coming day
A pulsation begins in the spine’s
Aperture of the thing
Where bowels rumble
Imperceptible revolutions

The cry of the thing in crested foliage
Living aqueducts of time

The realness of things. They collide and break. Those who remember how a thing looked on the day of a great event like a funeral, birth, or the dawn of a major armed conflict.

The thing smells of the event
The thing’s skin colored in the event’s painful, dismaying, joyous hues.
The monitoring of a thing in its shelf, never looked at, gazing at lives as things that move in and
out of doors, step on sidewalks and sit on chairs with books, sodas, juices.

In the dream the thing curls into metaphorical secrets of other things
Their translucent abilities only a thing may neutralize
It names fabrication, delusion, transience and fear
It taunts with redemption

Collecting twitches, mixing rain, snow and pure sewage
The thing resembles a vibrating bat
Or a rolling caterpillar
It prefers upside petulant feet hopelessly in boundless air
The deluge of a weak tendon and improperly toned muscle
The organ failure and donor’s blood
Tissue of a decanted creature

The thing does not breathe. It waits and counts years, centuries, millennia. It waits to become
monumentally invisible. Boils, cools, freezes. Erodes and crumbles. Layered and inventive, it is
sometimes meek.

The erotic moistness of the thing
Its sexual sentience (and I want my thing)
In its sleep of thingness, its moored speech
Its motion leaps with mortality
For I am mortal in the thing’s mass

Its germs and worms, and sweet corrosive flamboyance 

The thing’s erogenous folds
As repetition of another thing
As archeological artifact
As lonesome and ecliptic fossil
Weapon or kill

The flames that wash a thing
And a keeper of things

+++

STILL LIFE OYSTER FANG


She exits a bone
woos dark feathers.

An oyster peals itself
on the metal surface.

The half-filled cup&

lobster head.

Pink ornament in dark frame.

I smell the color of rooms
pine scent of old Sundays.