Poetry

The blushed syllable it wore 
with its whole body,
tawny rose-hip orb
of antique origin,

Now it is night again, child on my chest.
I croon & my song drifts you toward rest.

This is not my making any ecstatic,

sleep-deprived screed

“Think,” Aretha Franklin and Ted White, Aretha Now, Atlantic, 1968

How a fuchsia blouse becomes
bougainvillea, or
a pair of greyhounds staggers
into abstraction, zigzag

Primitive angiosperm, genus 
prior even to bees,

When the fledgling fell 
from its nest, by meager attempt,
by pinwheel descent,
and lay, unguarded,

Famously late, light reaches us
eons past its own extinction,

Sometimes I wander around wondering
where my mother is. The family buried
her next to her own mother. Out there,
the hard pines darken early. Anyone
can hide and not be found for years.
Bobby Cherry laid low there. The girls came
in his dreams...