Jeanne Wagner
It’s spring and our lives are closed
until further notice,
camellia trees dropping their blossoms
like sepia ghosts on the stairs,
not just the gardener
but everyone wearing a mask,
now that the air’s an invisible regatta of spores,
every space crammed with cross-pollination,
seeds splitting with desire,
haploids searching for their other half,
desperate for completion
microbes sailing up the bloodstream,
breaking and entering the cloistered cells
like any horde eager to conquer for love
or loot or Lebensraum.
Because we’re all seeds, all seekers, all swarm
and flock and herd.
I’m asking, can’t we just stay indoors
a while longer, turn up the music, let the world,
so worn out from our needs,
restore itself,
let the sky shine like blue glass over the cities,
let seaweed be seen, swaying,
in the bottom of some Venetian canal?
—Submitted on 06/18/2020
Jeanne Wagner is the author of Everything Turns Into Something Else (Grayson Books, 2020), In the Body of Our Lives (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2011), and The Zen Piano Mover (NFSPS Press, 2004), as well as of four chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Florida Review, North American Review, and Southern Review., among other journals, as well as in anthologies including The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry (Sundress Press, 2020), edited by Ruth Awad and Rachel Mennies.
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