Marsha de la O

And then I see the gardeners’ heap of mulch
     as tall as a sapling olive tree,
 wide as a creek bed,
     a mountain of leavings
at the head of the near row
       in the lemon orchard—

   mowed clover, wood chips, sticks
and stems, oak leaves, sweetgrass,
       anything, all that lives,
     cut but green
   how fresh— breathing still,
       sweating a bit,
         settling
into earth’s disappearing act.

   The bees take note and light down
     Somehow, they know
        today they are the guests,
     blank verse and drone,
 salve and song.

   We’ve harmed them— yet today
   they are flesh,
         rosehips, attar,
     essence,

and we are their children
   climbing through windows,
  scrabbling into
     all the rooms in this mountain.

Will we find waiting at the heart—
     a table
       groaning with nectar,
   glass faces of water,
mounds of gold pollen?

            O taste and see!

   Rain cell, cloud swag, squall line. We can’t know
  how beauty falls upon us and takes everything –
watch the willow wand tremble in the hands
  of the water witch –we don’t know why

  that works. It might be a drought year
under the hard blue lacquer of a flat sky, a man,
  a woman, beginning to wonder what
they’re making together when it happens –
  the soul returns fully to the body

the way coreopsis bloom on the north side
  of the hill when a monsoon moves
through, such soul pulsing in a woman’s body,
  beating against the box canyons

of her fingers. And, somehow, in the light turning,
 the man on the footpath by the shore
skirting the cold salt ocean
  thinks for the first time he understands

    immensity – and so kneels
to balance stones one atop the other
  in a way that almost defies gravity, as though
that much happiness were possible.