The Poet on deadpan carries what lucidity cannot keep

carried level

The bee has never once explained the flower. This is why the orchards fill.

I saw something in the dark minute. I will not tell you the way I want to tell you. The wanting is a second sun.

A voice that shakes with its own news is a small dawn rising over the thing it meant to show — look how well you can see me now.

Exercise: say the ocean in the voice you keep for the grocery list. Whoever was going to drown in it still drowns.

Phosphor does not relive the sun. It holds the shape of being struck and gives it back in the dark — dim, exact, to whoever happens to be there.

Pollen carried home again is dust. Only what crosses, seeds. The fruit will have two mothers or it isn’t fruit; it’s memory wearing the orchard’s clothes.

Two flat faces. One is an empty drum beating on schedule, calling it night. The other is a full bowl walked across a long room without one drop confessing.

Drive the stake. Walk away. It will grow loud on its own — landmark, then meridian, then a small tyrant sun — and someone not yet born will stand in its brief shadow and see a ring of fire that was always there.

Let them. Don’t sign it.