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Such a frazzle of dry
snowflake feet—Queen Anne’s Lace
cages of brittle ribs glued
to a birdseed crochet.
And you’re like a bird
when your windborne weep
notes stretch out on fast
wings, a hook-
billed shrike when you plunge,
toting your poetic lens
into gloom’s six dead
colors —Like now:
Each leaf’s meat is a rigor
mortis island, an entire death-
clenched Manhattan. Yet
whatever you can haul back
from the dead in this prescriptive
light, you’ll gulp like an overdose—
These clovers, calyx-stiffened
into prickly upside-down Statue
of Liberty crowns; plumed, vagabond
blooms, arch, like you
in their failings, in their driftings
and wild decay. Touch them
and the table’s polished mirror
litters with faded lupines, spurs
like horny hummingbirds’ beaks,
white fleas of pollen.
Under a microscope you scan
specks peppered from a thumb,
perfect, tidy embryos
complete with umbilici.
Today, what you really love
is how the clover’s hairs
show up barbed and sharp as harpoons.
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