A knot of daffodils spice the hawthorn. 

Come evening, when the sun is dipping 

beyond its realities, they are a set of pale antlers 

cut from the head of a forest lord. 

Then, the meteoric pearl of a crow’s eye 

as it leans down from the wind to source 

ornaments that flame in its mind. 

Anatomies of known things. 

Little bones in the garden,

some twist of fate brought them here.

A pile of star muck swirled in a bourach

of hydrogen and think of that, the wastes of space

it all comes from. Melted away on a candle wheel

I will be born into and remain something

that is constantly changing. 

For God’s sake, the birds were dinosaurs.

Then the great wave slung low from heavens

and there was nothing flying, nothing so tall.

But here we are, mingling with the dusts of others. 

All hemmed in, tapered at the waist,

caught in this separation between earth and the after.

Reaching towards skies but locked in a theatre 

of rooms, floorboards, long fields of honeycomb 

and buildings of such mathematics it dizzies 

temperaments of the impatient among us.

And what of you, hawthorn, your pockets 

of pollen blast? Your phantasmagoria? The 

old world deer remembered in your cloot? 

I see what you’re up to.

The whole flicker of it, a slate of cloud-shift

three miles off and behind that, a spray of pasts.

Moments when it stood, back to the wall, 

a blue-veined outline frozen at the knees. Or 

you turn over a leaf and see that it has veins, too. 

That they lead outwards from the center. 

It’s a charmed life.

There’s a blazing in the dialogues of stars,

a tune to waxwings rummaging for feed

in the hawthorn’s blackening gut.

Daffodils are telling their stories of the meteorites 

and of the spheres, unpronounceable dancing energies.

These are the movements of universes, their measurements,

as hinged to his father’s shoulders, a boy

identifies the wonders of diggers and cranes.

“Look, Dad! What if they were dinosaurs

with big mouths and the butterflies were fireworks?”