Poems for rain-dark bark, moth wings, shed skins, lichens, and the things that become enormous when someone bothers to notice them.
No analysis required. No taxonomy. Just a little paper, a little weather, and enough silence around the words.
The woods loosen their handwriting.
Bark goes black.
Lichen remembers green.
Mushrooms rise overnight
with no interest in permission.
Every small thing
comes closer to the surface,
as if the rain
has asked the world
to stop hiding.
There it is on the bark:
a perfect former self,
split neatly down the back,
empty as a little house
after the moving truck.
Growing is strange.
Sometimes the evidence
looks exactly like
what you had to leave.
Two lives agree
to become one shape
and nobody passing by
knows the bargain.
They make a continent
on an old stone,
pale green borders
spreading so slowly
time has to lean closer.
One bulb
and suddenly the dark
has an address.
Moths arrive dusty with night.
Beetles knock against the glass.
Wings write circles in the air.
For an hour
the porch becomes a city
built entirely
out of wanting light.
There should always be room in a field guide for the thing that cannot be measured.
BUG LOVER / POETRY ROOMSome things are worth building simply because one particular person would understand them.