Free Green is the Orator by Sarah Gridley Page B

knock
    of the hummock, its earth-swallowed packets, its gists of pollen
    in the peat’s dark core. Nymph
    that the huntress
    dug an escape for—faceless in the weir, an
in
beyond
    a glass or dam, escaped
I am
of the mirror
    branching. In sequin
    switches of light, in wending rash of magnifications.
    Thread in. Morning lens
    to a bog orchid claw, to its yellow life in the wetland body.

Arrowsic
Oscar Wilde made Narcissus
two eyes in which the water loved itself
leafmeal
burying the fall in water
summer like a coin to pay with
to see above the decomposing
a boy climbed a pine
first we split a champagne bottle
the graceful shape
then swam for the middle
of the widening pond
then you noted
a foreign-
language distinction
word for the leaf that has stayed
on the tree
word for the leaf that has not

Eidothea
    Some greens are like coins
    whose profiles the sea is tossing. If skin like summer is off and on,
    if dressed for summer, it runs the grasses.
    On the rest of the day, a rareness could land. So long to you
    who softened the volume, who called my shadows into blue-
    dark hills. Fountains like luck are lucid,
    and strange. Or climbing the air
    in postures of power.

Sunrise with Sea Monsters
    In bulletins of spray to sky, a morning forgets a million yellows.
    Stroke of yellow into grainy noun, now a light quarried from yellow.
    What is your face on the face of the water? A mirror conceals
    it begins in stone. Noun of informing and resuming yellow. Stone steps
    inside of mirror, appalling and alighting yellow. Yellow washing onto steps.
    Granite that begins in grains. Stars of a monster iris—from yellow
    former to former.

Where Hardly Hearth Exists
    a turning out to air the contents. Content to say,
I have
or
had
,
content to have a go.
    The hearth bricks round a temperature.
    In the kind of sex that is metonym for spirit, glass gets wings
on rags of sand. Glass,
    a sister in feeling, lake-tinted, transparent above all in family.
    Â Â Â Â Â For the breastbone’s base, a slip in volume, a modest depression
    outside the language of anatomy.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
Heart-spoon. Mud-nester
, here and after, I give your core
    same walls as integer. Elaborate lean-to, where fractions spoon and chime
    with sky, in the lowest rank imaginable, in the mining of bones
    we know to be mineral.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Mine the bones. The hearse will float, the horses shed
    their shoes for swash. Flowers for a space of flowers.
To swim a cove at night
    at eighteen naked, luminescence slipping from our wrists.
    Prior to writing as a form of possession, what lights and shadows
swept the walls.
    Now from the shallows of reverberating furnace:
    a wager in the panic-grass of sight:       blood-shine of the dahlia
    a coming closer thunder, blue soil
    of molars, coinage, pollen.
    Such being
    the bitter angels of our nature, a curse (traditional, Wexford) went
    like this:
    May the grass
    grow on your door and the fox
    build his nest on your hearthstone …
    may the hearthstone
    of hell be your best
    bed forever
.
    Gods in every hook
    now hang above my hearth. In the eagle’s grasp
    of Prometheus, in the weirdest grafts & parturitions, in the mulch and dung
    of devotion.
    Â Â Â Â Â Seeds slippered in core        slight cargo the star in midarchive
    of apple
    sick, conceivable, wooden.
    Â Â Â Â Â Matches & kindling
    enough. Switches from a tree for a fire digesting knots and beetles, popping
    shares of blood—
    Â Â Â Â Â no longer a fire
    but grass to my knees      green transistor      & sometimes resistor
    (you will know the resistor by a voltage drop across itself)
    no longer a fire
    but sometimes an incense:      the pocket dictionary I take abroad
    embered to one annunciation. Read
coming rain
    onto gathered starlings
    rain
into swallowing pinecones:
    open/close