Green Squash on Gray Wagon on County Road 54
in Avon, Minnesota

Round uneven sumptuous it heaves up its weight against
the pile of leaf and litter and farm trash

It wants to be let out

From our fingers our hands our ragged vertebrae and rubrics
of summer, huddling

the telluric nerve

Where we learn by heart and rummage how to batten
down the hatches

The sky the signal and random valence of light the eye unlatching

                      : the pure green shock of it, fruit
                      : of the tree, its thorn and thick drift, its ungentle
                      : brawling

The sky lengthens

The color of fine dust at haying time

 

 

No Extreme is Parmenttary

What shall we two do weight of absence & customary law hung

                     within us like a back bone?

If you are so passionate as you say (and as I dare

         but not believe

                     it so), it cannot last as long as            

         velvet in snow

                     spoors and weed roots braiding 

                                     scarf of sunlight on your neck

or whsssst of the gray owl at dusk white

         branches blossoming

                                   

And foraging:  Ruines of War we suffer Equally:  plundering

           loneliness how so ever unworthy

                       I am in myself I would as soon forget

                                    all good an eclipse of here & here

as forget you wakeful in the thick branches of evening

 

 

 

Title: from the betrothal letters of Margaret Cavendish, #14

     

There, Just There, Where the Syllables Touch

I have feet that slip out of their shoes.
Ankles that break.  A blue neck.  Fearful little rebel.

Like the multitude in a commonwealth wanting
a head. 

                 The fire is cold.

Early deaths have decomposed
behind my eyes. 

                   And tilted mirrors.

Birds can not rise from the roof.  My mouth is
past repair.

             Sin, my darling, sin is invisible.
It does not kiss the block of its ineptitude.

It requires a warm coat.  And cutlery.  Linen
bleached and crisp.

It asks for pulse, for practice. 

You can run your hand over its fragile
necklace.  Its thistle spine. 

Astonishing how rapture keeps.

Words sing like crickets even as I wash
and wake in every room of my small

house, there just there:  winter
gone sprawling and gold. 

All its weight lit up.

 

 

 

Title:  from The Earth as Air, Gustaf Sobin.
Italics:  from Biography in the First Person, Stephen Dunn.