The garden spreads a fire of green

and at its end she stumbles

upon a sizzling sunflower,

its flower fiery, its seeds

and fruits a burnt brown.

She turns back toward green

stalks, sepals, stamens,

lowers her head to avoid

the flower’s gaze towering overhead.

She evades the heavy sticks of sun

burning a halo atop her head

by envisioning a round oval,

a praying turtle in a goldfish bowl.

Collecting spit beneath her tongue

until a salty warm drink emerges,

she coughs on the air trapped in

her body’s long pipes as it dribbles down.

With a sideways glance, drinking in blue,

she imagines white, touching fingertips

to the tops of petals, gliding palms

over the tickle of pistils.

Sometimes

in the late, the dark,

the challenge is still

to slip through

no matter what the size

of the locks—seductive

draw, near-lethal

undertow, still

endangered.

Couchmate from

the Gospel of Jung,

spent, supine we lie

sometimes

in the late, the dark

thousand miles apart, still

drawn and

quartered, still

challenged.

conjures.

(A ride to the give and take creak of saddle leather.)

Hooves step carefully over a place

in an eerie primordial mud where a very

strange anemic plant branches

under the thick thatch of last season’s grasses.

A hoof sucks at the same mud the odd plant roots in.

This is no crossword puzzle,

there’s no way to make it come out neatly.

Grasping at spring gnats,

there are two suns in the plant’s heaven.