by Michael Bettencourt

Created on: May 24, 2008

PLACE

The garden plot is ready to be chaptered
by vines, roots, broadleafs, pods.
The pruned grapevines will be wound
into wreathes for later giving
and the fresh manure, with its
gift of saved ammonia, is spread across,
feeds dirt and nostrils.

The line of oil and wood chips chart
the chainsaw's confirmation of mass.
The down arc spills the magic
that turns suns into warmed nights
and bread baked to be split and eaten.
Each sixteen inches, each maul's swing,
insures late-night reading and good sleep.

Brush is gathered, filed for fire,
dead leaves peeled into piles,
grass raked into breathing.
Flowers loosen flocks of color
and the forsythia shivers into yellow.
A hummingbird, its scarlet paddles churring,
churns nectar from the air.

At night the table's set with necessities
and we eat with good opinion.

This is the place we go to hear
no gossip of ourselves, a partial place
where we can forget long enough,
where pools of yellow kerosene light
wrap us like turned-down beds
and the piping eros of peepers
is the morse of our own blood.

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