Last night’s lightning shocked the yard into green.
Now sunlight deckles its edges,
and the silver maple has fallen to pieces.
I and the baby’s cries, the wind chimes,
and the fractured or bending lines of trees
have grown querulous.
This in a world already thrumming
with the noise of praise and complaint.
The whole animal symphony,
the murmurings between leaves, wind, grasses,
the buzzing circuit of my own soliloquy:

How can you hear me.

How do we listen, breathe, sing into these distances

borderless      elemental

What if oceans

Skies full of waves

What if trench-deep     atmospheric sea    alien liquid song what if

some unfound frequency

at which our voices meet.

If I speak
with moans of whales
or caws of crows
or chorus chirrup of cicadas.

If I crackle and lisp like filaments of flame,
if I become the bog that sinks the sparrow or the light
that burns the dry log into cinders
or the swamp water that hollows the cypress,
will you lap up the flames like milk,
will you breathe through the empty cypress or cinders,
will you enfold the sunken sparrow, will you.

What if sugar-rot, what if housewreck,
what if carrion crow and deer carcass,
what if frozen husk that cannot be shucked,
what if rage that lives in the marrow.

What if honey-tongue. What if please
What if underwater embrace and crush of mystery,
or only this.