“... to explore the vacant, vast surrounding ...”
— Whitman
1.
Whitman’s patient spider
would recognize the abandoned shards
of crosshatch in a shady corner of this dock,
the sky so cloudless, calm.
Birdsong, breezes, frog-splash, and
for a moment I do not exist
though my atoms whistle
a tune to the lovebird (lone bird)
illusion of flesh.
Cock-a-doodle-doo
in the distance: Brother Rooster!
adding his notes to the riffs.
2.
What is the scent of vanishing into?
Is it like the brackish smell of the pond
that holds its flotilla of pink lilies
aloft?
The twig at my feet, dried and broken, has a needle-eye
where a bud should be, where the sharp instinct for being
tried to insist.
for Susan Flynn and the Georgetown Poets
Susan Kelly-DeWitt | Botanical Garden
Contents | Mudlark No. 46 (2012)