Tumbleweed in Bloom
You want to remember the earth as a
pristine place. It’s so much nicer than
what you see, which is to say,
that the nothing before you becomes
the nothing behind you, and jogs
nothing too. No memory of what
grew here once can stifle their pink
buds, foreign veils of green, a diaspora
that walks below the crooked hayrick
of a hawk’s nest, or covers a badger
jaw, its bright white teeth. These plants
are only in the business of making
endlessness like water, of growing to
the horizon until they become it in some
way, the sky trapped on its skin: the sky
drowning in an earth it did not choose.
Hannah Rodabaugh is the author of Lost Cathedral (Cornerstone Press) and four chapbooks of poetry. Read more.