The river is not a road so is an invitation

for the mind to roam the spaces between

cities where mines still pine like bulbs

for a springtime-worth of weight.

Don’t all seeds long to blossom

their coiled code? Even the dead

don’t know how to stay

closed, worming as they do, rooting

as they do. Leafing new

into the same sweet light.

The river reveals nothing

of where things vanish to,

only the ghost-pool

of my own gaze.

This date knives

right through, passes

like any other day. My body changes,

but less vividly. I can only call it healing.

I can only heal, as the battlefields

this river feeds do, scabbing green

over the soldier graves, the child graves,

there is nothing it can’t stomach

into fuel. It should be easy to stomach

loss the size of a walnut,

an apricot, when there are more atoms

in my body than stars

in the known universe. I don’t know

if we are the reflection

or if God refracts nightly into stars

to shame us. Either way, we’re mostly space

and survival. We can only stay dead

a little while, before green muscles in

to wake us.