Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations. Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies like a snowflake falling on water. Below us, some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death, snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn back into the little system of his care. All night, the cities, like shimmering novas, tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

I stand neither in the wilderness nor fairyland but in the fold of a green hill the tilt from one parish into another. To look at me through a smirr of rain is to taste the iron in your own blood because I hoard the common currency of longing: each wish each secret assignation. My limbs lift, scabbed with greenish coins I draw into my slow wood fleur-de-lys, the enthroned Brittania. Behind me, the land reaches toward the Atlantic. And though I’m poisoned choking on the small change of human hope, daily beaten into me look: I am still alive— in fact, in bud.

Visible, invisible, A fluctuating charm,
An amber-colored amethyst Inhabits it; your arm approaches, and It opens and
It closes; You have meant To catch it, and it shrivels; You abandon Your intent— It opens, and it closes and you Reach for it—
The blue surrounding it grows cloudy, and
It floats away from you.