Even so, it’s a cold spring
I unroll the map of the watershed, and my fingers trace the blue threads of the rivers
as I’d touch the veins on my throat
I chant kalmia latifolia. pinus silvestris. geum odoratissimum
as if I might travel once more the fresh land of the Choctaw and the Creek
as if the hooves of my horse, like Bartram’s, might splash red with the juice
of the trampled berries
I fill the gas tank, chart the wobble of the earth, its tilt, the shape of its orbit
The words I taste—Milankovich, albedo—melt on my tongue like the Greenland
ice sheet
Hear the beat of the drum? That’s my heart
Come now let us reason together
Because the honeycreeper
Because a bag of bones on a museum shelf in Mauritius
Because clouds thicken like swamp gas in the marshlands
Because the fetus will not ripen
Because the relict trillium, and the tanager, and the wren
Because the solar flare of blackflies on our skin
Because malaria, because dengue fever
Because of the dieback and the auction block
Because the kestrel
Because the peach orchard is a memory of mildew, ash blue
Because the fetus will not ripen
Because earth everywhere is archipelago
Because I taste the words, and these words, these words they stick in my throat.
