By Nathan Bartel

Florence, your flowers
bloom perpetual turquoise,
& the starlings come
to your fields casting
undulant rainbows
across the near-dusk.  
Cut cleverly into a drift of snow,
an inhabited house with an oaken
door, the bedclothes tucked
soundly in at the corners,
they say these hours are luckless
& the seraphic tattoos we wear
are shot through with muons  
& hold little lava back.
But I’ve seen an entire landscape fold
itself, catlike,
to embrace a day just like this,
even if it can’t feel its feet,
even if grape arbors punctuate
its wooden frame.  
The gap you left glows a little lavender.
It iridesces through the breaks.  
The breaks of osage & cedar.  
The breaks of ash & pine.