Poem

Turf

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Here in the strangeness you are straying through, a citron hawk is yawping as he wheels, fluorescent moss is yielding to your heels and trilliums are blooming where the Sioux lie heaped in barrows. Even death is new. Go stroke that pine, feel how the resin feels. . . Manhattanite, your touching awe reveals how otherworldly nature’s been to you.

There’s no bodega, zoo or high-rise here— a broken moldering birch, like déjà-vu; like déjà-vu, that grove alive with deer and squirrels, flying squirrels. Amnesiac, why is this forest like a place you knew? Not Central Park, but deeper, further back.