Doe’s Plea

Let me glow for you as purple glows for bees: see
             me, see. Breathe, be
in time with me.
                      What is it you take when you
hold up the dark shape, then
             turn away?

I feel, though I stand, I’ve been hunted, cut
                and millioned into
squares. Just
                         be with me.
   Let my gesture
                reach you, with nothing hard

between, only the penetrability of air: my lashes
              move the molecules
to touch your pupil’s lens;
                           my exhalations tingle
your lips. This
               is our delicate tryst.

There were years I had such fawnlike
                hope I would be seen as
a being beyond
                           my cells, held in the heart as a child

    holds wild apples
                 in her lifted

skirt: held, not captured. But so many
                would-be masters
  sought the image only, savored it, until
                            I, suffering to take
       even a single
                    step, nevertheless

began my ceaseless 
          wandering. My footsoles are
exposed, not encased in hooves.
                             Merciless Earth—
   I feel her genius
                through my toes, turning me how

she wills. I cannot get away
from life; I
  surrender to it now 
                             like this soil yields to my steps.
    Until dirt will finally bury me
                it gulps the many

seeds I press. These rhizomes
                 send up shoots and stems, sentences
suffused with juice.
   Can you read the hours

   I’ve spent?
               Please don’t merely look just to say

you’ve seen, but
                see. And when I jump and clear the fence, then
    vanish into depths of aspens
                            dotting, with their shivered coins,
        the further grove’s
                  eternal

pine, recall me
                with memory only, with dream.
Let your reverie make me
                           chromatic: a black-and-yellow

      humming
                    among the ultraviolet salvia.