The Green Joni Mitchell Sings About

i hardly remember the hours on the turnpike

smokestacks raging on both sides of the Delaware

volcanoes in the shape of termite towers

(maybe forgotten ghouls work inside)

(murderous hellspawn serving out their time)

(maybe they sacrifice goats, talk in medieval rhyme)

the turnpike fractures

a seamless asphalt slide––

thin routes veining thru soybean tan land, where

trees huddle in plump splotches on the dense horizon, where

thin rivers carry retirees wretched over the oystermen of old

i don’t register place until

(there you are)

fields Green as the howler monkey’s home

(oxygenated canopy, at last)

Green whose season is half a week

(april is the cruelest month)

Green who asks my eyes to roam

like vagrants along the hills of old

braille tucked in each blade of grass

behind the illusions cast by the looking glass, the

braille left behind by Heroes

the Green promised to me when i sat 

small, in beds of bleeding heart bushes

under the weeping cherry grand hall

where i allowed my fingertips contact

with the circus’s wide open jaw, no

where to go, no thought to the approaching fall

the Green hidden from me when i stood

large, each foot in stranger canoes

head submerged in cold stormcloud folds, i

forgot the heavens above, floated like

flotsam on the current below, always i

forgot, and let fate leash me to the shallows

the Green elusive to all but Pan

conjurable only by the sinewaves

sailing on the crests of your hands

––April 8, 2020