I spread myself out and melt into the grass
Becoming the blades of translucent sun-glass
I am the bubbling under the stream
The salmon that fall through acrylic and steam
I melt underneath and become beetle shells
The nettles the splinters the crunch and the wells
The hollow and echo and ghost through the trees
Breathing the waters and rustling the leaves
I am the sky now, the moon-clouded sun
The breath in your lungs and the drum of your run
I am the skin holding blood to your chest
I am the dewdrops on pinecones undressed
I am the rock rolling up silver hills
To generate forest from butterfly frills.
I am the scraping of birdsong at eve
The kisses of lava on saltwater frieze
I am the washing of particled stones
The salt-weed and sea moss and ocean-bleached bones
I am the jungle infusing exploding
I am the tundra diffusing unloading 
I am the depths of sulfurous sea valleys
Crabs spidering through my Riftia alleys
I am the heights of the quartz-weighted peak
Lighter than air where peregrines seek
In one slip of time, with a reach of my toes
A stretch of my hips and scuff of my nose
I reach out to space with the tips of my hair –
Come talk with me, child; you’re under my care.

[Featured Image: Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains by Albert Bierstadt]

Lizard lays on log lapping up the light
Never nodding off unless it’s nearing night
Licking at the air, licking at the stone
Clicking blackened claws 
Happily alone.

The dandelion lived in a curious meadow
Where tulips and roses grew wild
The dandelion talked at the yellow sun
And smiled at the passing child
The roses and tulips said
“You don’t fit in. You’re simple and tiny and sad,”
But the dandelion yellowed itself for the birds
With all of the yellow it had
And mirrored the sun with all of its might
And thought that one day it would burst into light
Trying so hard; living simply and glad. 

The roses and tulips grew old and decayed
The dandelion woke and its beauty had frayed 
But the dandelion captured the whitened sun
In its prisms of fluff all arrayed
And it danced in the breeze and sung with a wheeze,
“I’m living; I won’t be dismayed.
I’d like to improve the world a bit
Make it a brighter place
But if I’m to fade, that’s how I was made,
So I’ll smile and bow out with grace.”
Then the dandelion drifted off to sleep
And the wind scattered prisms far and deep
And the birds and the grasses drooped down to weep.

But then by surprise, before all of their eyes
Fed by the sunshine dried from the skies
Dandelions covered the meadow in streams
And sang to the sun, and flourished and dreamed
From the dandelion’s still life, out sprung the young
To sing out the joyous still left to be sung
And the old dandelion looked down from the sun
And smiled as the sky shone brighter by one.

Love is the leaves clinging the trees and the trees cradling the leaves.
One harvests minerals, laps up the earth, the other soaks light from the sky;
trading and talking, in springtime and fall, coming and going to die.
They nourish and parasitize each other, generous thieves who reply:
“We the leaves reincarnate the /trees/ reincarnate the leaves thereby”

[Featured Image: Paris raining]