this planet is dying & there’s no poetry can live in that I’m sorry.

--but if the future reveals itself as a sentence

I say we must drag

the avant-garde into the grass.

they say solanaceae aka the genus of nightshades

outgrow the shade they throw:

tomatillo , wolfberry, tobacco, petunia. petunia?--yes,

petunia. taxonomies outgrow us, too, so

survival I imagine will rely upon the wildcards, recatalogued,

pinched at the root & upbraided as anise-scent

into the air itself, just like:

“ well wild wild whatever

in wild more silent blue.” not quite as quiet

as a painting. not as the air

a painting doesn’t have. to esteem what’s surrealest

of our vocabularies is to subvert the unreal & redeem the, the real.

nothing about the is ethereal,

it’s there, ready to pluck.

an acorn is to the oak what the elk is to a chandelier.

& what hangs evenly from that?--evolution, a fine-

tuned perversion I’ve grown stupid against

to understand: blue, as flavor, for instance; blue-raspberry

in the 7-11 haunts us as the idea exudes from its vaults.

unlearn yourself, it says. crawl

before you walk--& that’s why you’ll need to train yourself

to unlearn yourself, if you want to escape the “I” ’s echo. “crawl,

before you walk”--like the escalator you are.

but I am staring into Noémie Goudal’s Cascade

where there are no stairs,

no stars,

& all’s the water in a waterfall, replaced by white linens, aligned

by traffic going everywhere & nowhere

& it’s likeable

to think what nature wants