The yard looks still.

Winds riffle green-coin
leaves, slim white-preened bark.

Sage blooms rust and scratch, each purple nodule
at last breaking in breeze
to settle in a riverstone crevice.

Pale roses wilt.
Ridges curl, brown-strafed.

Below, roots mottle and twist, an endless
lurching and creeping through undersoil.

Ants hustle through flagstone
fissures, scream a frenzied silence.

Harvest is hell. A spin to thicken before fall.

Spikes of green fronding into an afternoon,
a horned cloud above bursting with the violence of spill.

Originally appeared in The Lascaux Review