as if I’m undeterred by wildness 

come for me 

in scintilla/ storm flash/ shred           or shadow       cinched 

high or low                 come for me 

 

in a clough/ in the treat of warmth of a shallow ravine 

in the narrowness of my imagination 

come for me as a hole for filling

                       that may be mine of blood & slick 

 

femina 

 

or something somewhere else       of grasses & reeds & snowy 

swaths as yet slid oblique to one side in opacity 

in this particular  

place for hiding come for me in the paltriest or in row upon row 

 

of a gayly painted canvas tent            striped 

red & orange & blue 

as I’ll come for you (don’t you mistake me for how

what where      I appear dreaming of green 

 

of paradise of home where pilgrims never set foot 

that was never

the point nor leeching the land of blood red rust staining the rims

of my fingernails)

 

come for you               in your need in your

restlessness by which I mean in a sleepless trough of the westernmost 

pomme de terre            rising & falling with each breath 

riverine not 

 

vegetable (yet named for the potato-shaped root 

of turnip grown wild) her feral rapids rushing fast 

over a sandy bottom               this singly segmented 

river (beginning clear & cold in Otter Tail 

 

County         emptying muddied by eroding banks

into the likewise unhealthy Minnesota) but not the first 

favorite bankside sycamore (growing everywhere

east of the Great Plains – except wouldn’t you know it

 

not here) 

the largest of them all alongside streams beds & bottom lands 

as down in the old growth (so we call it) specimens – so difficult to reach 

so long ignored – round their chalk mottled girth      beg admiration 

 

in this our living natural history museum untouched (we so want 

to believe) by plow or spade               so we imagine & so 

we wish considering our own loneliness at the center 

as self-appointed hub & cynosure 

 

of all multitudes (notwithstanding any creature/ beastly

or mild) swung in dugout canoes        drafting shifting waters below

or hollowed for shelter above            or sturdiest worked 

for a three-legged stool in another life altogether

 

come for me 

in my companionless weald              & by that I mean only 

to be without fracas & discord nor anarchy living amongst 

near centuries old wood of these trees never taken & used 

 

for such things as a musical instrument (specifically a violin 

of sycamore back & sides & scroll) aberrant certainly 

as the wood is one-third less dense than the mostly preferred maple 

(& in resonance deep as the uncontrolled 

 

flatulence of my very elderly mother likewise full

of plaintive apologies alongside my own mute 

misgivings/ imminent inasmuch as I’m more like her than any one 

of her five children) 

 

but not unknown in makers’ workshops 

the world over            yes 

come for me with the varnishing brush in my hand

& oldly – from the Middle English aldelike –

 

set aside now in craquelure glaze unmitigated – near worn 

away – yes come for me in the naming commonplace whereby

I measure         control & reserve to dominate 

to watch the mounded snow as it swims 

 

toward spring in a tension between unblemished sky 

& ice blistered late autumn grass – big blue stem & switchgrass

& sideoats grama        & still to          in vigilance

wonder at – feebly in the mystery of my lonely 

 

possession – a melody unlearned/ unfolded/ the riddle 

of the mortal               the uncertainty of practice 

& the practical what I hear in scanted application                    anticipation

come for you              too