Mags

Mental Contagion

Aspens

The dusty dry plant smell of the Steamboat night, like camphor and myrrh. A giant church in the searing bronze moonlight.

Fluttering fades
gold flows into the sky
hair grays
bees return to hive
melting snow
a green sun leaves

Brilliant gold
burnished underground
fills the tips of quivering leaves
scattered ashes
the roll of wave
white sun
old graves

The leaves flutter
incandescent
flitting gold
to the blue
depositing secrets in the stars
turning sienna
lilting to dirt

Green grows
like a sunrise
measuring moments til
chlorophyll bleeds
gold

Half the air at 10,000 feet
twin hawks spin silence

Crimson petal bleeds
spiked pinecone bleeds
sparkled rock vein bleeds
whirling chalk dust bleeds
lightwhite bleeds
oxygen to vacuum bleeds
breath bleeds
incisor bleeds
knuckle bleeds
hemoglobin bleeds
at the edges of things

How can I describe the hills?
Dull gold stuck green pines
faded stiff grasses
rocks like elbows, waists
provocative
sex hidden in ocher brambles
and dirt

Thousands of gold butterflies
affixed to skeleton sap filled
stirred
delicate chimes

How long a cow's skull
trapped
before freeing life
into humus
into oxygen
into chloroplast
into cow?

In three hundred years
a tree fills space
one hundred feet high
forty-five feet wide
eighty feet down

In three hundred years
tree not budged
but seen the same
cumulus cirrostratus granite
flow through twelve hundred
breaths
frost bud leaf fruit

One hundred nine thousand five hundred
blithe dawns blistered noons blushed twilights
the same
stratus altostratus quartz
are a river gushing swirl
in the gold fluttered iris
of three hundred years