In the bronze skin of your rain-mottled angel of immigration
who looks forward
with a faux diamond clasp
of upward mobility on her watery clavicle,
inner rain called mizzle is shining—
a frayed chrome-polishing
rag on a bicycle while the fig tree
loses its foliage due to a blight called rust. Dear millennium,
destined to be a girl,
an artist not engineer,
you’ve never fallen in love. (Do you even believe?) Centuries,
this peace offering—
a non-fruiting olive
transplanted
after your lavender died of root-rot
on a winter afternoon in the north.
(Day after a sea storm, holy
and granular—
bayside hailing clean off the rim, napthlalene
stored in mothless boxes of air,
of agelessness, hybrid tea-roses, and rocket fuel.)
Ear-shaped, honey-combed morels
flourish by the rosemary, edible yet uneaten—
dearly so, as evidence
of a battered dictionary you once loved, too. (Light-drenched sea,
all its charismatic splendor, is a room
of meticulous self-reform,
noxious blue-eyed madness
of the dead.) For this reason, your ancestors
wished to sail on a ship around a landform
to its southernmost point (Dear millennium, what we loved
is written tenderly in the dregs of the earth.)
Dear millennium, see how immigrants
yearn for departure not extravagance,
freedom with a notion of rootedness
or nesting.
In doing so, this generational reimagining, dear millennium—
you are cured of nothing
yet everything at once.
