
ALT With your broad veined leaves like violins in late spring the tiny bulbs that distend stems, sexual as any flower, you grow full in the sudden warmth and then suddenly all is calyx and orange cuneiform the petals lay upon the ground like some alphabet to decipher telling me to look up at the light that tunes. And there against your trunk once more I see my grandfather smoking and staring off at a thing distant as if a sailor might as Ursa Minor rises on the far horizon. I touch your scarred bark, and it repeats the names it should not know. I wasn’t here when you first sprouted, nor will be here when last let go samara. But our people will make dusk with our dead, as the falling leaves fiddle on the wind.

ALT Black text on a blue background displays the poem "In the Next Galaxy" by Ruth Stone. Things will be different. No one will lose their sight, their hearing, their gallbladder. It will be all Catskills with brand new wrap-around verandas. The idea of Hitler will not have vibrated yet. While back here, they are still cleaning out pockets of wrinkled Nazis hiding in Argentina. But in the next galaxy, certain planets will have true blue skies and drinking water.























