How long have I lived wishing for anything but  
this body. A pack of hounds  
moving through tall grass. My broken  
tongue, a grammar of gunpowder. To be  
thicketed in saplings, cool & chiaroscuro  
where the fox escapes & licks its limping paw. Yes, 
make me redbud. Make me trestle. Make me long & lush  
as the word rhododendron. Not these lips  
sealed tight around the word deserve.  
I’ve been the fox. I’ve been the hound. Hunted myself  
past all recognition: clear-cut, control burned. Scoured  
any part of me wishing to smell a flower. 
These days, I call each friend, say  
I adore you. Words salt-flushing my buds, exalt & bloom— 
a loom on which to rewrite the withheld. The midwest’s  
sucked in breath—crows cavorting the empty  
swings like epsom salt in a bath. A bramble  
of stars. A theme made of twigs about  
to snap. Even here, a beginning. 
In a photo, an elderly woman stands  
beside a rhododendron bush planted at her birth 
now the size of a house. Which is to say  
gentleness is a vesper. A bur-filled, backlot skirt where streets give way  
to woods. Trillium’s trill, oleander’s  
permission—periwinkle, huckleberry, heal-all. Bees  
stumbling out with no knowledge of the life  
on their backs. To be wild with mercy. Like the wind  
from elsewhere. Hoarder of no apology:  
to never know the word border.