SMALL
May I offer a tart and tea, my friend? Plums
with rum-soaked currants? Black tea with bergamot?
Sit on my green-dark porch with me before the rain
starts, with this inchworm crawling along my thigh,
searching my denim landscape for meaning
and not equipped to find it, as I am not equipped
to make sense of the present chaos, forces
not just here and now, but with us
since we left The Garden, bark scratched
from the Tree of Good and Evil under our nails.
Desperate for positive, I keep chirping sweet nothings
to drown out the troubles, the sea of assaults,
the masked men among us, how else to live now—
how to go on, except to lace my blue-sky shoes,
to fill my eye with the eyes of sunflowers, witness
the iridescent wasp having a private moment,
folding itself in poppy-silk petals,
the fat-bottomed bumble so heavy with pollen
it sideswipes my shoulder as it heads home
before the night's storm, a small thing, lifting.
