JONATHAN BESSETTE

If Wilderness Is An Ouroboros, Then Your Voice Speaks Eternities Either We Had Arisen From Planting, Or Out Of Many Different Soils.

Jazz vocalists lured me into
bracken to meet your curvaceous
ivy, constricting my attempts
to shower you in flower petals

My only habit of excessive
became incessant bouquets
built a time-lapse decay at
the river of your gestures

We circled inward under a glowing
canopy of melting cedar and hemlock
pine cone, murmured April in Paris

mmmm mmmmm mmmm mm mmm

Your skin. Smooth as waxy
salal. Hair. As soft as Old Man’s
Beard. Our entwined bodies.
Flowed. Sisyphean streams. Pushing
each other. Up a hill to nowhere.

Sitting in underbrush, I tickled at matrimonial
ideas with fronds of a deer fern, while you
pricked with spiked leaves of invasive holly

I preached, the socialist fungus, their
symbiotic redistribution. All you had
to offer, a limp stem of foam flower,
like wet envelopes falling out a mailbox

Nightfall

Crickets owls frogs sirens?

We buried ourselves in damp
fronds, beneath a mountain
ash that might protect us from
evil spirits overflowing our recesses

In this primeval forest, innocence
became a kind of ritual, exploring
failed romantic, simple as spores
or windblown pollen, subtle like
parthenogenesis or outcrossing

In sunrise golds, I fed you red
huckleberries, and you stared
until I faded from sunbaked
granite, returning to the wreath
of our hydrological cycle