i.

I fall onto the earth,
heavy like the wave against the coast,
and just as naturally.
my hipbones were made to dig into the earth
as defined as shovels,
to anchor me into the grass.

ii.

The suns rays are like golden liquid today,
and they greet me like an old friend;
I get the sense that they have travelled
a thousand miles to nudge me with warm fingers.

I feel swallowed by their heat,
my heart patting a happy rhythm through my shirt,
digging itself a burrow,
half in my rib cage,
half-escaped into the soil.

iii.

Whitman says that this grass
is a handkerchief dropped by God,
so that we can search every inch.
And maybe he meant God, of Israel,
or maybe god, a literary device
that means something to old poets,
a kind of textured idea that sits in place of
love or justice or maybe condemnation
but I have my face pressed into the grass,
and I can feel capital-G-God's signature against my face,
as flamboyant as any John Hancock.

In my head, I can't help but smirk as I wonder,
"Whose?"

iv.

My philosophy is mind over matter,
so today I am nourished not by food,
but by photosynthesis,
and instead of the heat swallowing me whole,
I will swallow it:
absorb it through my leafy arms,
breath it in, hold my breath to wring every
drop of sunlight from the air.
It is summer
and my body is limitless.

v.

When I look at nature,
I use mostly my heart and my eyes a bit,
and leave my glasses at home,
so that I can see it face to face.
The edges blur, but the color is more than real.

vi.

A girl thinking about the near-nudity
of deep summer
told me she relies on water, lately,
and asked if I was doing the same.
Determined today to soak up only the sun,
I can't help but think about her.
The oak tree, maybe he's embarrassed
about the size of his roots, but I have my doubts.
I, though... I told her no.
I explained that the dimensions of my hips,
they didn't have anything to do with the
dimensions of my heart,
and that my legs could take me past ten miles of asphalt
if I put one foot in front of the other.

"Nature" and "human" are not such dissimilar ideas.
"Art" is not so far off, either.

If you took a blueprint of my body, or yours,
you would see how perfectly the joints fit,
how gloriously functional every chamber is.
A portrait of my crooked heart would show
that one of the doors opens and directs traffic
the wrong way
down a one way corridor.
Still, it's beaten a million times,
to bring me here,
to right here,
to right now.
So that I could swallow the sun on a steamy afternoon.

vii.

When I get up,
I comb bits of tree-debris and dry grass from
my hair, that too, wind tangled,
a modern day Rip Van Winkle,
and the world is different.
Darker now, and cooler,
the remnants of a summer afternoon's heat
still soaked into the grass,
my shirt,
my skin, warm to the touch.

I kiss the grass goodbye.
I know whose.

viii.

dear world,
my heart is an empty room.
come set up camp.