my darling o you dahlia
of my third eye teased and pinked for
that enormous sneeze if I had any serious tigers they'd
growl and purl for you like butter
pumpkins fattening in their patches they'd be smiles wider
than water wheels or baobabs and if I
had my way it would be out of here straight past starship
enterprise to mistress joy and all
her deadly pulsars yes you mix me up and down and out
I go trala my fingers trailing fragrant
flocks of meteors or silky bolts
brighter than entire skies but each of me so animal
we curl into your palm with every pore
a pout until the universe unpicks its seams
and lets all its impossibles

Compost thickens desire:
leaf, branch and root.
I knew a woman lonely in her bones
Who could not supplant the morning scone:
A ticket in the thicket
A flame on the edge
Nothing can turn the bed
The turtle within is froze.

A tisket, a tasket
Let memory warm her basket:
A egg that glows
A furrow, a sinew
A tender little wind blow.

An elegy for winter
A splitter for the spring:
Green bud, blossom,
upturn round joy,
go sinew to sinew
tongue and lick
& once again
the pink & harried flow:

Sorrow, not bitterness,
is all she knew:
A grief, A grief
Once upon the pasture
The plough shares, the plough shares.

for Theodore Roethke