Sun-Tongued Grove

The tire swing is an earring on chipped tree lobe
An o-shaped shadow marks the crayon weeds
In a tic-tac-toe game
The capillaries, the budding artery
Pulsating water and apple blossoms under
Thick corked flesh

The reddish orange dot of a robin's thorax
Lightly footing the Easter grass
Like a skipping stone over
These paper graves of last autumn's leaves
Now brittle and folded like
Fortune cookies and potato chips

My beautiful skeleton swingset
Your paint is sunbleached –
Maybe you have melanoma
Henna tattoos of our muddy shoeprints –
Size 3 or 4

Jeweled berries dangle like Christmas ornaments
The tinsel of fragile bush flowers
Amputated soldier trees,
Their phantom limbs casting marbled ghosts
Over catnip and macramé bird nests
A salad of dried dead winter underfoot
And triangled ivy

Throbbing feathered muscle of a
Black-capped chickadee in
The sun-tongued grove
Last year's white hydrangea –
Her surviving petals are
Patterned with pale and pretty veins
Like beetle wings
Or an empty stained-glass window