scuffed to smuts and flattened into the distance with burn-off smoke.
A giant abalone overhead is calcified inside and dribbled with sea-insect borings;
the heavy sun a whorl of shell-fish meat, black-lipped and attached with sinews.
That fleshy eye of sun is weeping scorched wisps above grass so eden-green
you could sprawl on your back for it, like some wanton of the south:
so juicy-sour, if it grew inside a round skin, it would poison you with bitter-sluttishness.
There is something so wayward about foreign trees gone to autumn,
like plump white women run to butter with too-sweet sex:
as though they are only themselves when they have lost their green sappiness.
And isn’t it strange how every tree you see,
not just the ones dropping their forbidden windfalls,
goes through a whole lifetime never knowing its given name?
More gentle seasons come and go, but always it is the tobacco aftertaste
of applewood pyres, the bossy flipflap and bully glide of seagulls
on a broad-hipped and generous afternoon that you remember,
like some careless mother who got herself up and ran away from home,
before you could even say her name.
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