—Here

come in under the tablecloth with me,

trefoil and dandelion spur. You,

soft-bladed violet and humming sting-

less native bee, slip inside too.
Beneath this humid hum-

an penumbra

this green

is itself already anthropic: a base
Relief, a carpeted maquette,

a hillside coaster slipped

between these jotted greyscale dwellings

and nature’s marrow, one

crewcut lawn at a time, one tiled

drive, one retaining wall, one storm drain.

Until there intervenes
A single small domain

of lion’s tooth unfettered and canker-wort,

monk’s head, witch-gowan and pissenlit,

of flaxen cities crowned

on globose pinheads.

Whose is it? Who is it
Who fails the test of suburban

propriety so completely?

Here he is, tethered,

shifting from phenomen-

ology to pharmacopoiesis

on this circuit, asking
His phone what calamity

might befall the dog if he eats this this-

tle, his eyes

stretched taut across our infrastructure’s tensile skin:

flora, macadam, detritus, 
skeleton pipes and orchards,

conduits, clotting lipids.

We have remade this world

even the parts

we don’t think of as ours,
We don’t stay out

of the valley

below Richmond

even if we seem to leave it to the black snakes,

the burnweed and the jacaranda.

But listen:
To the water

outwitting our sentences

one beachfront patio at a time.

To the sand in cosmic teaspoons

besetting our waterholes and gas tanks.
To the sounds

gone ahead unheard on a dead world or

one with red sky only &

small things plotting,

abiding, or departing

in the soil the sough
And sizzle of small rocks against

larger ones, no pennants

for the wind ’s teeth to comb

upon this airless hillside, how would.

You describe
This hexapod orchestra

its oboed saws and fricatives,

its grassy shawms & sighs

expelled from occluded orifices and faces

to one who never had such as ears?
Here we made the rocks that cried

and unmade them—

remember?

We are figments
Of the earth’s slow changes,

we pareidolias of the continents’ subductive

self-erasures: they shiver.

Stretch their backs

with the thought of us.

We are oil

for something’s future
And then the world,

a pit picked clean