This is me. This is me trying
to make sense of twigs and dried matter
on the path, beer cans and cinders left over
from someone else’s bonfire—
This is me trying to make sense
of swings in weather,
of the sun’s nearly always meltingly
cheap, successful seductions
so layers come off and all
we want to do is lie
in the yard or on the beach,
shirts off, trousers off, hearts open—
This is me,
mother of many trials
stumped and stumped again
by the fact you whip out yet another one
between the real-world-job
and the third-, fourth-, invisible
shift job that says open more, open,
open, Mamacita, you’ve got
so much to give. Not to be
ungrateful or quotidian, not to be unkind
or unmoving, but for once I would like the water in the ditch
to taste more like water and not like dried grass in the mouth—
In response to Via Negativa: Emergence.