Melissa Kwasny

Their eggs are laid on lupine. Tiny jade hairstreaks I could easily mistake for dew. Too precious. Too incidental, and besides that, blue, these trills that flounce in my potato patch, drawn from dryland origins to the domestic stain of water from my hose. What an old woman would study, I think as you hand me the guidebook, distracted by the replica of a parasol growing out of a bleached cow pie. The Siamese kitten with his butterfly eyes comes running, his mouth full of swallowtail, his breath smelling of borax and sugar I have poured over the ant hills in the garden. He is young and intent on eating poison. We bushwhack through Paradise, what is there to say except to lament the daily evidence of its passing. How the common blues scatter from my shade. And you, so fragile, so sick, so thin, your diet restricted, keep pointing out the bearded face of larkspur. When the angels fell, a fifteenth-centruy bishop says, there were 133, 306, 668 of them. It takes us all afternoon to cross the field. The body, it is so sad what happens to it. If you fell, you would dry up instantly. But these are not angel wings who disguise themselves as leaf or shred of bark, who are named after the stops in meaning our language must make room for: the comma whose wings look battered, or the violet underside of the question mark. To keep the mind from clenching, you say, is the main thing. Even the most beautiful days always seem to have death in them. As Valentinus said; our fall into love and sleep. You especially like the dark alpines with their furred bodies and lack of marking. And the sulphurs, yellowed scraps that fall from a myth of origin that doesn’t include us. When we find them, we will wonder who is still alive. We speak of our souls with such surface ease. But who will take such care for us? You bend and bend to the scrappy blue sea, your back turned to the moon fluttering above you. I have been thinking so much of strength this week, yours and mine, I mean, the field of attention that can be strengthened.

The Crow call this time of year the Black Cherry Moon when the rose hips are blood-bright, spattered on their overwrought stems, and the creek calls so clearly in words almost our own as we come sliding down the bank. Last night, we covered the gardens in plastic. The chickadees were back after their wide diet of summer. We ate the last trout, its spine curved from disease. So much can go wrong, I want to know what you will promise me as our hands reach in and in through the copper, the carmine leaves. I know you are lonely, alone with your grief for your parents who are not my parents, for your life, which, despite all, is not my life. The cherries are thick here, hanging in clusters, purple-black from frost. It started to rain and I am chilled by it. Each day, we promise, we will talk of our fears of intimacy, how we still expect to be hurt when we love. You bring me a coat from the back of the truck, but I want to stop our task now, to sit in the cab of the truck while the gray spills, slick with thunder. What if I kissed you there in depth. After so many years, I can misunderstand the difference between instinct and obligation, how my hand continues to grasp the stems. Keats said poems should come easy as leaves off the trees, but see how they cling and wrestle with their ties. And now, the sun shines. It is not this grace I had imagined. When Keats said poems, I meant love. The chokecherries roll easily into my palm, then fall into the plastic bag that binds my writs. Over and over, until we have enough, until our fingers are bruised with their dark juices.