Earthly Meditations

The Afterlife 1 Spring, and the first full crop of dandelions gone to smoke, the lawn lumpish with goldfinches, hunched in their fluffs, fattened by seed, alight in the wind-bared peduncular forest. Little bells, they loop and dive, bend the delicate birch branches down. I would enter the sky through the soil myself, sing up the snail bowers and go on the lam with the roots. Licked by filaments, I would lie, a billion love-mouths to suckle and feed. Where the river will be next week, a puddle two trout go savagely dying in. Notice the bland, Darwinian sand: bone wrack and tree skin, the ground down moon bowls of mussels, viral stones dividing like mold. At twelve, I buried the frog because it was dead and dug it up because I'd been dreaming— a fish belly light, a lowly chirruped chorus of amens. I thought my nights might smell of hell. Bland, hum-drum, quotidian guilt— if I've killed one frog, I've killed two. Saint Rot and the sacraments of maggots: knowing is humus and sustenance is sex. It accrues and accrues, it stews tumorous with delight. Tomorrow's a shovelful, the spit of the cosmos, one day the baby's breath is no longer a rose.