This is the story I told Lao Tzu

over ACV shots down at the
moldy arroyo. His only response
                           was a giggle 
                           at this and that.
 
She blushed like the little orange hearts upon
tulip poplar petals ensconced in their sallow
and rain-slopped wax paper paddocks.
 
She combed all the rolling wold for the
four-footed clover though found only
broken bolts and this sticky astringent stench
of bradford pear flowers nagging at prattling 
grass blades—she splinted a bolt
with some chewing gum stolen
from friends and, forging a thong
from a twig and some flyaways
plucked from a tussock of monkshood,
cocked it taut as a pregnant pause, took
aim at the hem of the stammering sun,
and let fingers slip from the buckling tresses,
and gawked, the bolt slopped broken again
‘twixt hollyhocks blue and black and bay,
as the shadow snapped back from the buckling 
hair bent under and over their sovereign star now
sundered, the heat of twinned worlds amongst them
sprung into whimsically sizzling dissonance.
 
There was no motto begot of this,
gummed to a coat of arms and no
ticklish maxims mounted—
 
this was the world now, 
that which was and 
that which is left split
in a quickening instant.