Poetry

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...

hovering their mouths 

like two men 

moments before 

they turn on each other

that is how the grass smells 

In a nondescript hotel in East Texas, I fell
in love with a couple. There in the dim

hallway with rugs that were clean enough
but darkly patterned to hide the stains so who knows,

her back was against the wall, her arms up and around
his neck...

the hive swells outside
as its residents itch to lick our inner walls 

for moisture and respite