But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
******* up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

Soon self-driving cars will be the norm
And we will long for the days behind
Because we are unable to just go for a ride
Without a destination in mind

Does it mean anything
that the trees still had most
of their leaves when she arrived—
we spent the day tangled
watching them fall—
I introduced her to the larks, the wren,
the ever-busy squirrels.

And does it mean anything
that the next morning nearly
all the leaves were gone,
that I and the squirrels both
took a bit longer to wake,
to leave the warmth of our beds.

I wonder what it was that they were missing.

Wrote your name on another bridge today,
the second one since I left a month ago.
In another world, maybe,
I keep doing this until I die.
In another world, perhaps,
you do the same with mine.

when winter comes and you're not here to warm me
I'll go find the patient
and gracious sun, waiting,
like always, to kiss the parts of me,
hands,
eyelids,
forehead,
that miss you most

I wonder how no one else stops to look
at the perfect, untouchable vertebrae of the clouds,
the illuminated flies and gnats and mosquitos
hovering like snow above the grass.

How no one cares to talk about october breezes
between their toes, in the curve of their ears.

How no one hears how earnestly the squirrels
run across cool pavement and up oak trees
where they'll spend the next four, maybe five months.

I hope I'm not the only one
who notices these little magics.

I spend five minutes trying to catch
a mosquito between my palms
I forget all about my book,
about whatever I'm writing,
just to avoid a bite
as if a bite would be too much to handle
as if I didn't already wake up
without you this morning

I believe Home moves on;
without you, if it must.
And you find that when you try to return Home,
Home has changed,
Or it has grown.
Or it has moved out,
just like you did.