|
At dawn the stars swallow back their hard glitter which emerges in birdsong, the ironwood trees crackling with sound as the heat of the day drags its shawl through the air, and the birds go silent in sunlight, sunlight which tears open the dandelion, the fragile, doomed world a huge pot, we constantly fracture and glue together again. To smell the creosote plant, cup your hands around a branch of blossoms, breathe into it, it breathes back at you its sharp and musty scent. Bees through the heliotrope, a blue surround, a durable sound, how does anyone ever stay present for long. A cactus thorn in my foot, get the tweezers, pull there, no, damnit, there the leathery flap of the crow crosses, recrosses your body, my body with his shadow, not doomed, are we? yellow pollen between the fingertips feels midway between air and dust the rooms we thickly people and unpeople, desires we lug around, lay out, fold up and zip shut. The flowers sniffed and praised, picked, queried to the last petal, pressed and tossed. -- Helen Wickes lives in Oakland, California. Her first book of poems, In Search of Landscape, was published in 2007 by Sixteen Rivers Press. |
