Sestina (1)
For once, you are green
with envy like an animal
trapped between city brickers
instead of a river, frozen over.
There is no actualization of movement
no matter how much you wish
it to be. All your wishes
turn to maple leaves; green
creeping winds move
you to feel the instincts of animals.
But now they are frozen
into the steady bricks
of your evolution. Please don’t brick
me into this soft thinking - wishful.
I would freeze,
crossing from green fields,
in my tracks, an animal
without movement.
We’d hoped to move
out of this building, brick,
in denial of our animal
and wholly innocent wishes.
For once, we were green
without knowledge. Inside the freezer
our yearly harvest was frozen.
No longer alive and moving,
cuts of meat and greens
turned red, dusty like bricks.
Proven futile, our domestic wishes
devoured us, beaten like animals.
Curled up into individual animal
skins, we regressed and froze
our intentions. We thought of wishing
as a slow kind of movement.
Still we slammed our hooves into the brick,
tried to summon spring and its greening.
You remarked I was an animal, and you’d move
back from this frozen river to a brick
tenement, the day I wished us into a field of green.
