by James Maynard
Once I found a dandelion seed head
As big as a melon. In the gopher-plump grass
I thought it was a child’s lost ball.
I loved how freely it came into our sphere
Without a wrapper, or preview, or price.
Or the soggy afternoon we spent rushing
Half-drowned worms from the puddles
To the flower beds. A song of new burrows.
There wasn’t a circuit board in sight.
I pluck the house out of the sage by its spire
Turning my wrist to reveal its hollow underside.
And we just catch a glimpse of her, old bones,
Scurrying into the rafters away from her kills.
She is the myth I weave all summer
As you bury the lego man deep in the berm.
At night her whispers make happy words
To help the tomato blossom, or the beans
Stretch out. How her breath is the moonrise.
There are great halls where the dead are tallied.
Server farms blinking in the dopamine.
Aloft in a haze of bytes, mostly we dangle
Signaling our wants, binary scuttles, funnels.
On hot evenings we take off our shirts,
Barefoot in the gravel of the vegetable patch.
They say in some mother’s basement a browser
Stirs electric fantasies, darkly in the bluelight.
Here above ground, there’s fruit dropping.
She becomes a husk. In the very late summer
When the fallen fruit is sharp for acrid rot,
And the tomato plant slumps full to falling.
The pumpkin is a quiet rise.
Fires blaze midnight at the courthouse,
The G-men are prowling in sanitized vans.
Gently I set her skeleton in my hand.
She isn’t there. You count her transparent legs.
My dreams are never ending. We scatter her prayer.