Explore Poems: Trees & Flowers

I myself in summer hours wove together flowers

a tender girl plucking the tender flowers

Late in May as the light lengthens
toward summer the young goldfinches
flutter down through the day for…

Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought
Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning
Names in heat…

As a quiet little seedling
    Lay within its darksome bed,
To itself it fell a-talking,
    And this is what…

stripped batting of cloud
glimpsed ligaments
dusk coming up under
lithographic, nib-hatchings
       instruments click
       the fine-sprung locust
       replicate dinge along hill-lines
       tailings of umber, the rust smudge
There is still that hemmed ocean of oaks
       the various reds, the somehow
       silver cast over the...

“don’t tell me it was
the wind!” Frank shouts

“THAT TREE
WAVED
AT ME!”

Welcome children of the Spring,
   In your garbs of green and gold,
Lifting up your sun-crowned heads
   On the verdant plain and wold.

As a bright and joyous troop
   From the breast of earth ye came
Fair and lovely are your cheeks,
   With...

Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
y el caballo en la montaña.
Con la sombra en la cintura,
ella sueña en su baranda
verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de fría plata.
Verde que te quiero verde.
Bajo la luna gitana,
las...

On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.
The scientists who studied the air
were told not to speak of the air,
and the ones who worked for the farmers
were silenced,
and the ones who worked...

                                                            Hunger like her mama
                                                            Most strong in White gaze as in
                                                            a Cowbird’s flirtation
                                                            Sprouted in eyes to tongues
                                                            to bellies pregnant with stolen milk
                                                            to restless hands
                                                            These fingernails filled with Black body,

Some are transformed just once
And live their whole lives after in that shape.
Others have a facility
For changing themselves as they please.

Green I want you green
green wind green branches
Boat on the sea and
horse on the mountain
Shadow on her waist
she dreams at her railing
green flesh green hair
eyes of cold silver
Green I want you green
Under the gypsy moon
things are seeing her
but she can’t...

This this will it always be, and why
To ever argue for: here walking
In its life, or sprawled, or loitering
Down shallow valleys of the lawn:
The trees that are there
The pigeon bobbing through
Its fallowgray ellipse of ground—
The comfort of this ground
Is physical:...

And the light, a wakened heyday of air
Tuned low and clear and wide,
A radiance now that would emblaze
And veil the most golden horn
Or any entering of a sudden clearing
To a standing, astonished, revealed . . .

That the actual streets I...

200 cows         more than 600 hilly acres

            property would have been even larger
had J not sold 66 acres to DuPont for
                waste from its Washington Works factory
where J was employed        
       ...

A week of autumn snow, and today the sun,
the buildings fizzy with melting, the beggar
draping his sheets over the bank's homeless-spikes.

My daughter runs under the sycamore trees,
shouts look it’s still snowing, it’s still snowing,
clumps of old snow falling around her.

Who...

Under which she pruned
the peach trees and a tiny gateway
opened in her spine. That pain
distilled there like a drop
of molten glass. And was the first of many
chambers to form.

There was her bedroom,
where she bloomed
in the white fog of sleep
and so...

They stand in parks and graveyards and gardens.
Some of them are taller than department stores,
yet they do not draw attention to themselves.

You will be fitting a heated towel rail one day
and see, through the louvre window,
a shoal of olive-green fish...

Ginkgo, cottonwood, pin oak, sweet gum, tulip tree:
our emotions resemble leaves and alive
to their shapes we are nourished.

Have you felt the expanse and contours of grief
along the edges of a big Norway maple?
Have you winced at the orange flare

searing the...