The line between romance and friendship is as thin

as the grapevine that drapes across your shoulder, as subtle

as the snake in the tall grass. Did you ever declare 

when I grow up I want to be a muse? Here you are.

In the garden you can choose how pink

your love is. Like a flame so hot it is blue,

some women are so pink that they’re green.

There’s one that kneels in the garden with a fist

full of mustard and the hope that it will germ—

she’s optimistic, she’s half full

of garlic, and even if nothing sprouts

at least the worms will churn a faintly fragrant dirt. 

Some women are so pink

they are worms singing up from the moist

earth, the blueberry shadows, the grass

that is dark as the rind on a cheese. Some

women are gooey and some are gouache. 

Some are the goats in the pasture with rectangle eyes. 

Some are the dancers—there are always dancers 

in the background. Under the sun 

we’re heavy with obsession: rumpus, aesthetic, 

saturation and feasting. We’re in the garden,

the two of us—you lean forward 

to pick the leaves from my sweater and I tell you 

they are thankless, they cling, and they cling again. 

You ask questions I cannot answer. I’ve smoothed the wrinkles 

from the moment—it’s not that I don’t like 

the attention, only that I don’t know what to do with it.

Nearby, a flautist plays two flutes. One is really a flute

and one is a shadow so dense that it harmonizes.

Her toes blush the same sorbet as her lips. We’re dancing 

around this idea: it’s not the mundane things that are immortal—

movie stars, amuse-bouches, love—it’s the bite too big to swallow,

the things that live 

in speculation and mess,

that charge the filament, seed the doubt, hint

at how you can carry the tension. 

Lines crooked as a tree, 

a copper wire springs from the lawn.

You pick it up, you carry it home. I walk you halfway.

Previously published in Soft Quarterly Vol. 6