We photograph the surfaces of twigs,
the burrs which form in rhythms on the bark,
for ad-infested apps to diagnose for us
beneath black poplar or common lime.
We wonder if the saxifrage shows something
like desire, if sorrel is conspiring
with emergent longings in the fauna,
looking up and north at circles traced
by swifts who haven’t landed in a month.
We’re proud of how we formulate our questions,
convinced our knowledge of ourselves as automatic
automatically outgrows that same knowledge.
Finding so much time on our hands
it won’t wash off, like a grippy smudge
of pollen. Someone over there takes
a picture with incongruous flash. Someone
else behind us helicopters seeds
towards the ground. I imagine them
never landing, though not exactly flying,
just doing something else to answer evening’s
sense of calling everything away from where we’re sat,
in earth so dry and lovely it feels as though
it cleans us, the ground no barrier, a continuance
instead, like a complex of waters or
the channel of a dusted sky. Somewhere nearby
the leaves of probably an American beech
begin to coruscate amid the lessening light.
In another place entirely, a system of
caged hens shams the motions
of a dustbath. In some conspiracy, we,
the trees, and every shelf of cloud
go on becoming, anyway, the night.