Gregory Djanikian: Reconstitutions, Dispersions

There’s an easiness in how the Black River
parts around the rocks
then comes together almost as itself.

Foxes deep among the trees,
beetles underneath the stones,
I’d like to sense them the way bees sense
the ultraviolet shining in flowers
as if they were the flowers.

I smell the earth in a handful of earth,
touch the atoms I might one day be colluding with.
I look at honeysuckle and think goshawk,
finger a willow branch and say lodestone.

Maybe that loose amalgam I’ve called ghost
might reappear one day as a mourning dove
fluttering at night against my window.

I, I, I, (as in impermeable):
how much of the world
has seeped into that slender vowel,
the carbon from the stars I’ve bonded with,
the oxygen that makes up most of my body.

The cold is pimpling my arms, and maybe
a molecule of me might have been part
of some plump goose a thousand years ago,
the air it breathed what I’m breathing now.

The alphabet of matter
transposing itself into different guises.

The river I put my hand into now,
river I might become, imagining
the feel of trout gill, fox tongue,
taking me, drinking me in.