August 16 2010

The weight of the suet-cage dangling from the dying branch
May be just enough to drop the precarious maple tree.
The movement of the dandelions scatters the spores to more fields.
The wings of the dragonfly derive their iridescence and vibrancy
Of color from the volatility of the Pleistocene, the infernal climate,
The bacterial vapors of the swamp, and eruptions of seas,
The same eruptions that hurled
Fish to shore to become amphibians,
Amphibians dinosaurs, dinosaurs birds.
The bloom of Queen Anne’s lace folds itself into
Dun-colored broom caterpillars devour to become the black winged
Emperor butterfly, not the monarch or the admiral.
The shadow of the emperor butterfly that shadows
And overlords the world of the ant, laboring
With its fragment of leaf between mandibles
Whose strength when expanded to the scale of one
Entire man could throw a Mosler safe like a shot-put
Or boulder or compact car into a concrete wall,
Break the wall into separate jagged chunks
Bending those corrugated steel rods holding the wall together.