by Joel Long 

Now let us issue from a darkness of solitude
—Virginia Woolf

Strike a spark, small green thing. I’m looking.
Perhaps a leaf will form around the breath.
Perhaps another follows as thought follows air,
believes another shape that is yours, crystal

living green.  Every furnace is dark that breeds
this scent, the spice Tuscan, broken between
the fingers and the hand, perfuming days
to come, and this one reaching above the fence,
even now, thumb-size, no hint of flowering.

The sky has a simple purpose: to hold flowering,
cloud or flower, spray of stars or batter hail.
Make me one thing.  Make me what you need
bringing structure, bringing clarity and yellow,

some geometry, say, the hexagons filled with seed,
this desire for the future like dizzy architecture
the bottom holds in every atom, every breeze,
quiet making noise that says here and before.

Joel Long’s book Winged Insects won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Lessons in Disappearance and Knowing Time by Light were published by Blaine Creek Press in 2010.  His chapbooks, Chopin’s Preludes and Saffron Beneath Every Frost were published from Elik Press. He lives in Salt Lake City.