Charles Burchfield, Your World


Your hummingbird-moth at its flower
is beginning and end,
way to become indistinguishable—

milk of the morning's glory fused
into a needle beak.
Then gulps of your air

we've misnamed with the label sky
begin even before
your ground has begun.

Great ripples of leaf—green heat—
push up and away, their
milky secretions as wavered

as any earthly surface
of ridge, of rock can be—
star swimming in rivers of star.


                       —Paulann Petersen

Kindle, Mountains and Rivers Press, 2008

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