Once the leaves had drained of chlorophyll,

sculpted themselves with rouge

and commissioned a warm light to gild them,

a few threw themselves down

to wash once more in this pooling

of a water most unlike rain. And you

cast yourself flat along the bodies

of the leaves, made yourself expansive

and did a wormy sort of work. Laying weight

on the film tension of water over concrete 

and gathering the leafscape to its boundaries.

Where else might you bathe except numb

in a place of your own making? The day, it went

in serial: finding a torpor so passive

as to ricochet: passion rises and falls on cue: crash

and recovery pass in quickstep: then and done.

So you’re in a new place, an unscripted space, here

neither around nor along plotline, you’re loose

and you’ve lost it. Far away someone

is patting you, this hand lets its weight

guide you gentle: far away 

there is a place where dreams grow

where they go round and quiet

and come down from the trees you’d left 

them in to find you and let you stroke

their new teeth. You will maybe never go there.

It is not a place where eyes go.