The celestial restaurant is cloister-quiet
and we are eating a forest floor.
Enthralled by the rigour of wood sorrel
placed with tweezers, we sit
among truffle and bramble-sharp cubes of gel
no bigger than a baby’s thumbnail.
The first bite feels like moss and sunlight
filtering from far away, I say, too loud.

We don’t know it yet, but several towns away
you are sitting under strip lighting,
nursing a miniature forest floor
in the dark space beneath your tongue.
Swollen polyp berries,
and a mulch of rotting leaves.
You wait for your name – the shiver
of a bough about to fall.