Wrens Hidden in Paisley

Endings offend me.

Mint grew in the soil-filled rain gutters.
We bit from the same leaf.

—

During my thankless devotion

to the idea of you
I imagine the first red.

—

Take the process of drying:
need misstep, as in cellar, must, root-gnarl,
and hours and hours.

What day does the tree complete its yellowing?

—

A father tells his daughter to wear snowboots
and she survives a holocaust.
This is not my invention.

—

I watched my parents
resuscitate a man.

But I have not learned.

I want an alder-wood house
planked to a snowed mountain ridge.

I want sustenance of skins,
eureka— the way another orbit
is always beginning.

—

And the congregants intone
for the sin of forgetting the forests…

It might be easier to believe
than to believe in another person.

—

You exhaust me.
Give me something I can hold— scarab,
glass eye, an intricate knot.

—

I think of thin sounds,
flies skimming the rice-waters.

Up to the knees, sore-backed, prune-fingered,
the harvest goes on.

Say one clear thing to me.