I mean accepting the alien you've rejected in your own heart

In the backyard, where the flowers grow, and the sky is all mine,

I swallow my own saliva  that you spat back into my face. I wanted to hold your hand.

The red dogwood branches I cut from the ditches with my mother last November burst green leaves like some June resurrection,

and the columbine kisses my hip— if I asked, would you tell me what it’s like to be held 

sweet as late, light spring; wanted; circadian?

I wanted to see you face, watch your eyes track the gulls riding air currents. I wanted to hear the crack of your voice.

But if I have faith in the peripheral,  I have to believe that lightning flash of energy wasn’t yours.

My life is flung wide as the season; as the sky; as the lake;

I keep my window open over night to hear the rattle of cars and insects and loneliness. Where will I go? What do I want?

I have always wanted to run till I reach water, still pain-cold from the winter. Now, I’m not certain

My poetry blows across the horizon in the dry wind till I fade into the green belly of June. I have always relied on words to exorcise the feeling,

which bites, and which demands, from my pounding ape-chest.  If roots don’t grow beneath the shape of the letter, then what’s the purpose of all these trite metaphors? But my chest is bottomless

with want,  stuck, half-drowned, in the black honey of a lonely childhood. Where do I put it down?

If I aim to make art, like a god makes man, then I must set my jaw, and learn some raw truth: what else? But you haven’t texted me back since Monday, and I’m imagining sitting beside you at the beach, studying how your hands move when you talk. The sky is blue. The trees are green. The goldfinches fly. What’s the purpose of roots if, in time, everything is eaten?

If you asked me, I’d drive north with my new license to you,  to a town named for an American businessman, with an Esso station and a Shoppers, and far more people than these crossroads I grew up between.

What’s the purpose of desire if it just swallows its own tail?

I try not to get too existential, to avoid the well-trod grass, but after 300 000 years of watching the stars come out over the water, I still can’t believe there’s nothing left to say. So, I say something, say anything, with the meat of my heart.

(Would you love me like that?) (Would you love me?) The flowering dogwood at the park is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. What else? I never thought I could have beautiful things,