I’m trying not to be offended by
the generation of plunder and vanish
spreading like a stain,  
and it swallows you with its hardness.
Your mind is a papery hive sliced open—
all the things you’re supposed to never mind.
It’s hard to see anything but severedness.

The whole world is burning or sliding into the sea
and she was tired of it all
like a loose tooth at the back of her mouth,
holding on by just a few threads.
What are you willing to believe,
what are you willing to ignore?

This is a poem about
that intrinsic knowing
the sumptuous nature of moving slowly,
the richness of rest.
Let’s try this again, I say to no one. I’m still here.

Go back into the green, green world.
There are ways of listening to those delicacies,
those radiance systems
where everything is vast and pristine,
a dream of wildness,
a whirlpool of silence
where she goes to hear herself speak.

She imagined she can pull all that hush around her.
It is blossoms that I want,
a rippling ocean of green,
the sky reflected in every body of water.
Bury the broken thinking in the backyard.
Everything is begging you. Come home.

I’m trying again to learn how to live with
wild tendernesses:        
       the tree mapping its history,
       swallows diving in and out,
       their fabled forked tails,
       leaves curled like questions,       
        kneeling in dirt, inhaling,
        pressing all that promise into the soil,
        the earthen color of the river,
        the flowers just now aching into bloom.  

All I can whisper is thank you
at that spot where the world leaks in.
It offers us to ourselves at every turn.
You can still imagine rapture.
Store it in your heart’s farthest chambers,
a way to keep belief near.
Tremble like dogwood,
feeling the rain touch down,
wild beautiful petals all around—
valves moistened in our mouths.

~ A cento, using lines/phrases from the following books:

All the Fierce Tethers, essays by Lia Purpura
Blade by Blade, poetry collection by Danusha Laméris
Entwined, Three Lyric Sequences, poetry by Carol Frost
Hereafter, fiction by Sarah Freligh
The Hurting Kind, poetry collection by Ada Limón
Wings, or Does the Caterpillar Dream of Flight? poetry collection by Cathryn Essinger
Maps of Injury, poetry collection by Chera Hammons
The Ghost of Every Feathered Thing, poetry collection by Paula J. Lambert
When We Were Gun, poetry collection by Deborah Schupack
Everything Gets Old, poetry collection by Grace Curtis