>^<

Brown painted picnic table
lit by pink baby spiders
quick crawl through dried rivulets of sugar
quick crawl over my wrists
I move to the drying leaves
watch ants and smoking cars move
over bridges and brittle stems
the fields don't ache somewhere for me to lie down
but cry with crickets in humbled midnight
after the fever taken to conflagration
after the kisses that landed like hatchets
loving a gnarled branch
off the birch's ash
we shed the seasons
return to a mound of tarred earth
to watch six feet above
our silence inevitable
learning to quiet toward it
larvae on the vein of a leaf
through the sunlit ground
quickened even by water
pond's history on oars of hand

>^<