Bless This Cosmic Gardener for Tending Its Crop

Bless this cosmic gardener for tending its crop.

A crook-spined tulpa with milk knees, shaking pollen from the hour's mouth,

feeding alphabet soup to the gullet which precedes a thought.

It hums in spirals,

beneath the hips of dawn,

seeding ghost-meat in a field of backwards doors,

each one mocking a different form of exit.

Today it planted a wheeze.

Tomorrow: a diagram of sighs folded into a paper lung.

I call it breathing.

It calls me soil with eyebrows.

The gardener weeps television static,

its tears mold the shape of my first forgetting.

That forgetting crawled into a lampshade once,

and hasn’t stopped blinking since.

It sharpens its trowel on the spine of a yesterday.

That’s how it grows,

by pruning the verbs from jellyfish,

mulching them into vowels the ocean-sounds mispronounce.

I saw it bury a shoelace and grow a street.

I saw it bless a teacup until it became gravity.

I saw it sneeze and seven boats disappeared.

Then I forgot.

Don’t ask it what season it is,

the calendar here is written in bruises.

I am just the aftertaste of its thinking.

Just a rootless crop pretending to dream of dirt.

Sometimes it names us with a gesture,

a backhanded bloom, a sideways echo,

a hand through hair that isn’t there.

Bless this gardener for what it tends, 

And for what it leaves untended,

The wild bit.

The lilt.

The small slip 

where something can become.