My poem “Metamorphic,” from the manuscript of High Ashes, appears in the first issue of a new magazine called The Colosseum. Click here to learn more about the magazine.

My son collects at yard’s edge the gifts 
He brings to me in a terracotta flowerpot, 
With another pot, upside down, on top. 

With a flourish, he reveals his treasures: 
At first they look to me as if they’re only
Rocks, but he tells me they’re clouds, 

Shapes we’ll name together as they change:
A gray stone, smoothed round, I call a ball, 
Another, an oyster shell, then a turtle. 

He says his rocks are meteors that crash 
Through worlds of wood and flower. 
I hold one in my palm and gaze until 

I see a meteor of iron, glass, and ice, 
Ten miles across, loose in the void. Next, he shows 
A nodule of flint, hint of arrowhead, 

But only when I’ve already seen it there;
A hunk of basalt, like a mound on the moon, 
A wedge of schist, like crags I’ll never climb. 

He shouts, “we’re floating over planet earth!” 
The world’s rebuilt in stone. The new-mown grass 
Is fragrant as an ocean after a storm. 

My wife's antique trowel is rusty and cold 
As a Victorian farm implement 
Drawn up dripping from an ancestral well. 

She rakes ground-ivy and yellow loosestrife 
Into tangled stacks of root-clump and calyx.  
The air is everywhere the smell of soil 
 
Turned up, heaped and packed down, kneaded like dough. 
The fattened tulip bulbs bend to the breeze,
Enflamed forges beaded with greens of bees.

The patinated bronze sundial, like some seafloor-
Dwelling creature, is dappled in late morning light 
Through the Japanese maple, newly in bloom. 

By noon, four flowerpots brim with rocks 
And stones, even flakes of painted concrete—
Bouquets, as if they grew there like that, 

As if they came to life for us today. 
He chalks galactic tails along the pots 
In voyaging flashes of lime and pink. 

He says his comet “exploded forever.” 
We exist after the comet. The colors 
We see, that vein the many-figured stones,

Are clouds burned off, purple mouthfuls of pollen 
In a Stone Age tomb, archipelagoes  
Of dried blood on the blue sea of the sparrow’s egg.