Poetry

Terry Wolverton

The Sum of Everything

Maybe sleep is half-remembered travel,
a bicycle upside down in the wreckage
of someone's discarded day. Flowers
inhabit the world of senses, loose
and empty their identities-yellow
and white-in the suspension of landscape,
streets and rooms expanding like paper
petals, forgetting their unfamiliar moons.

You are in my pocket, a transformed light.
The context is left to those who know
what words mean, those reflected nightmares,
liminal dreams. Memory can enter,
suck the day of colors, its nectared heat.
Now can seem stretched far into another
definition, collaged with eyes and trees
and purple stems. Enter; all awaits you.

Someone knows the sum of everything.
Death's scrutiny erases the happened,
hectic intrusion of ideas.
We may leave knowing little of this flaming
life, only the bright yellow pollen
glowing like sun on the half-remembered sheet.
Dress me in your particular found song
and hold me, shake my willing white petals.