Loveliness Is Now A Warning

Apples in the tall grass beneath wizened apple trees, cardinals on the stone wall between our yard and the neighbors. You with your excellent poems and sentences. Things that are red we can touch, things that are red we cannot. Or is it simply that when we name things a world appears and we cannot go beyond it, save in speculative ways that rely on our handiness with language? Grackles gather into flocks and what was once a loveliness is now a warning. There are better questions to ask perhaps, but who has the time? Afternoon passes in a steady sweat, working first in the dirt beneath the back porch, later mowing out back as far as the orchard, and finally restacking firewood that slipped in a recent rain. All we can notice is evidence of cognitive conflict. There are spiders everywhere, even in this wacky dream of local ruin, rivers in full spate roaring in the distance. Take me with you! And: I will not forget you when you're gone! In one place I uncovered an ax head, in another noticed that groundhogs only eat a part of the apple. It's not necessary to visit or send a letter, love. Eden has no plural.