seeds

In the everyday trees we saw the

branching sketching outline

of what could be ours:

a nervous system against the sky,

risen from roots

headed ever-down.

You knew the phylums, the latins,

handed out dead men’s names

to mark our daily walks

as based in place,

as pinned to themselves.

For my part, I had no trouble

with a wordless home.

I lived in the unnamed

(had been left to its devices,

somewhere while ambling),

and you took me for it,

took my placeless face value

by the throat, for the wild road ahead,

and said, Look:

a live oak,

a myrtle.

My devouring self-satisfied

idiocy, my spacelessness,

o’erleaping the unknown,

saying It’s probably nothing,

plunging towards

death without edge.

But you said rivers must begin

small, and somewhere;

you told me my ripples started as a stone.

When you held my head underwater,

tears painting your cheeks, waist-deep

in the pollendrunk springtime morning,

and I broke the surface,

seeds clung to me.

Now I am sprouting latin claims to this land

that brought me up to lay me down.

Now I burst with legibility.