They think, as greennesses think, of freezing, and of the gowns of dawn that churn, dissolve. They think of a man like a heart, silver in a holocaust Sunday, botanical in a limbo like flesh. Daylights magnify the eyeglass glisten, they think, as they listen, of libraries of green, that one spring when the burn was an ink slow to dry on the Bibles they had written, pseudonyms invented, the futures they would sing. It occurs. It has a motherhood other worlds devour. It has a nest that expresses like a leap. Look. Wonder. Only one litany is left ajar.

Cutting teeth on the songs of sheep and all the happiness we barter for.

Will we each be peopled by the distances, will we utter what the corpses bleed, endings, chemicals, will the extinctions befriend us? Will we thrive there among the cartilage and veils where no one hears or cares, where the great beasts freak and lie, shut up in a god, mirrored in the crude light, miles from the rudder of the body, its solitary parchment, its iodine coast?

In a country I thought I could tame, the gorsebush flowered, the pollen