Busy Lizzie. Wink and blink. Touch-me-not. Impatiens, as ever, a virtue my
dear! Enough of this love your perennials and they will love you back threefold
and several seasons. If you don’t like it, pull it out!

Midges and tetchiness.
A constantly muddy mood.

In my impatience for mail it strikes me that the perianth is a floral envelope
—a cloak concealing the reproductive organs . . .

The wide sweep of today.
Books, flowers, and poetry. Woolgathering and trees.
The wood garden is fervor, a blaze of primula and anemone.
The poplar is passion, viola-resonant, my vibrating footfall.

Nature must prick us with her courages also. —Vita Sackville-West

Mad March dreams
of crane flowers,
birds of paradise.
Strelitzia reginae a deft cut
of bird and flower.

Manifest from the imperceptible
convexity of the eye
—that by which we know the earth is round—
eternity is circular
but flat

ripped apart like a daisy oracle
huddled in the empty arms of your real estate
i turn you over in my mind as on a spit

Pindar says the poet must guard the apples of the Muses
like a dragon, but I grew up among Christians,
I pierced my dragon side by scraping off the scales
the way I clean fish in the sink.
A barely saintly gesture, but surgical.
You need gloves, scissors,
and a lot of running water.
And listening to its splash I start to meditate.

The book rotted by the rain, the clay that’s slipped,
the earth screeches, plates collapse,
the walls lose their grip on the paintings,
nothing is aligned like the planets we think we understand.
Within the shock announced this morning by the howling dogs

for angeliQue brathwaite

this living liqurid mmemory
deep tidal embankment under the water
breathes through the sea’s leaves like lamplight

dreams itself a green island lizard
long before you was born
branches of blue into tunes of blue crystal
softness of turQuoise and terrace and moon