I love the ombe’ing green of leaves in Kentuckys June where near downtown its heart the afternoons smell of the Jif factory buttering the air with roasting-smells for square-miles     is the way back to forty years ago   it’s been the same ever since my childhood was outside playing with the neighborhood boys and walking home from the bus stop on those streets wrapping downtown where the neighborhood man with schizophrenia all the kids called crazy Jack I used to go all-heart-out-involuntarily for had lost his ability to see the facts 

before I left I didn’t understand the grass here being called blue the way water isn’t really blue if you hold it close to your face but now my eyes having been greened by other states’ long Sunday afternoons  patches of prairie and wheat where from above me flying over in a plane you would never have seen me sewn inside those quilted patches of green brown and gold   (but I would have been there (for twenty years)) & I understand far more about landscape shaping who your body is & what it knows and will remember than before

the sky view here is woven with the tangle of vines branches and trunks so many wise trees I’ll never know the names of them all   not the way they have come to know us   slow  without the judgement we arent worthy of watching over while we sleep on the other side of window-glass or walk below them cocking our heads back like baby birds mouths open gulping air  for green splashing of their-leaves to help us forget some things and help us remember others

the air in may was sweet everywhere this year along the downtown streets cobbled in places by brick and mansions 200 years old and  now June is an early morning every morning the birds seem to sing my dreams their ends       the air thickens with the notes and the encroaching mug of summer more and more each day glazes skins from all the atmospheric juice in the air  :  the way a person feels draped in the summer of it is not unbogged breath but honey-ier   heavier    everything is honeyed-heavy and anticipated with the clink of ice and glass

I was a girl still when I once wrote a story about this place about  being a girl who lives and dies inside one of these beings that now tangle my sky   it was triumphant because it did not deny what it was nor could it in the end be anything other than itself — a vessel of bone  skin and blood  emitting minerals oxygen carbon inside another vessel of trunk and vein doing the same