Catherine Graham

            The moon arcs—in and out, playing form.
            Stars wrap our fate while intruder dreams
            signal: come back. They hold our stability with quickened steps.

            Stand where grass weaves basket strands, make
            the centre heave, the pinched earth speak,
            before thoughts erase and we have no names.

            Fixed on the busy you miss the owl-winter, the who-cold
            crizzling lake. Raindrops inside snowdrops.
            When our shoes sprout hello-flowers, cold lips pucker, speak—

            What to do but follow this thread? Wind circular words
            to chain our necks. A necklace without clasps
            means another light’s not listening.

            To think story is to construct from that other realm
            where jade water cools fire’s friction. Pockets where pleasure finds memory.
            Take this nosegay, touch intuition, before we float off the page.

            Now go past sentence. Air-sheets shatter—absorbed
            by grasses and creatures scurrying there.
            Viral green points down, we watch the swarm.

            Swan’s neck quickens to question—her wings,
            snow-blinding flaps. Nest birds have it—twiggy cup to sink into
            after cracking. The rub that brought forth twine and twig weaves the cradle.

            Head naked like a freshly hatched bird, moist with dew from the wormfield.
            What moves in tawny spurts, jolts. Silence rearranges. It does not mend.
            Seed. But know bloom. Unravelling defies gravity. False to think otherwise.

            Fools. We have a future to hatch. When roots shoot out—
            the sun-calling art of escape: leaf, sepal, petal—the sun
            plays hide-and-seek. Silence is a kind of flight.

            Scratch light to a rain-flecked level. Twitch strategic to inhabit submission.
            Repetition renews. Upland by the railroad tracks—eggs disguised as stones.
            Slip past daylight to a time held by skein of old stars—

            past evening, past waiting—
            Enough! Never enough, until pulled to flight or sleep.
            And a dog bounds helplessly wet for a tossed stick he cannot find.