understand—

a photograph can’t
nor memory

seagulls cannot speak to it
nor the chattering of children

red of geraniums
already beginning

petal by petal
to flit away

Fallow

From zero, infinity.
From two, sometimes twelve children.
The harvest yields a hundredfold.

Each night
I return to lay again
amidst the desolation,

but then the sun comes out
and all green things
begin to flourish once more.

Yes,
I have decided
I will let the milkweed grow.

longing

deep in a forest you part the underbrush
find morning sunlight glimmering off a pond

in the shallows whitetail stoop to drink
their hides so bronze you take them for naiads

but don’t we always lose ourselves in some wilderness
alone and in peril of being remade into an echo