Even emptiness must be signed for
when it is addressed to you. How joyous
to share with a friend this gift –

the entrails of skinned oranges, shirts
irrevocably stained with slips of pulp,
houses left empty by couples grown old

and alone together. I cannot say enough
about what has been left behind. The past
blinds us, asking for adoration, a still

and ugly, timid and benevolent god.
We want destruction for mini-malls,
sick in their consumption. Are greeted

instead by dandelions pushing through
the pavement. Touch the creepers on
the unwashed walls, the moss living

on whatever rots the fence posts.
Sometimes we rush past the wreckage,
buy oranges, go home, dream of

new and glass-green things.

The holly fawns over the blue star.
The black glass isn’t in the window
anymore; awns left by the lift
press on maybe as much as breath
sticking itself in the river oats.

Lawns left by the mind, desert
of trim displacement, centuries
of a cultivated refusal to need.
Not just – no longer. Empiric
monocultures of thin, fake jade
carpet roll carried on shoulders.

Shrugging trucks dumping N.
Eutrophs scabbing the water.
Water collapsing the wind.
Grapes will wind into elms;
selves growing thicker, then
thinner skins.