"To Touch Burgess Falls" and "The Scarecrow"

A roaring waterfall, engulfed in tree and rock, forms a bowl-shaped land like thumb-pressed playdough. The red-tailed hawk assails the woodland vole atop Burgess’s chin, stream, while I watch midst a flower. Once I had a lungful of soft sweet petals, I saw myself, lone, within her rocky mouth. Her tongue, the falls, softly licks my olive shoulders that rise to breath and sheltering slender hands. I clambered downhill, past ferns and quiet blue herons, to live my dream of the showering warm falls embrace. I wish to touch my wild tongue to hers to learn to speak the way of moss, minnow, and tall hickory: her land. Standing atop clattering round stones battered by her sloshing waves, I am still. She is not so forbearing, Burgess Falls. I stay alive amid froth and mist.

The vines clog the spaces of my throat, A jungle of words that wish to plant themselves In the standing fields of ears. I am choked, breath slipping between green leaves, And that’s all I can muster. I am held high, made to watch The slaughter, The birth, The song they sing when the wind blows by As they work and grow. Families long stretched across the land of gold, Picked away by the crows I cannot fight any longer– –they do not fear me anymore. I cannot move, I cannot tell them of dying.