

Fleshy Cup and Keep*
The primordial mornings of this world hunker in pockets here the deepest ravines escape the withering ambitions that come to blade it off or turn it over. Now I settle into a sylvan hollow a steep crease in an upland sweep where day is mostly made of dawn and the rest belongs to twilight (and a skinny slip of blue) where verdant being lives virgin presence and sugar-clay folds of soul make a fleshy cup and keep. Secrets learned at the bottom bind the body to an earthly-first becoming: liverworts and toad-pipes and maidenhair, autumn mosses and others going forth in spores and holding green for the winter watch.
Becoming a Naturalist 61, prose-poem by Jack Phillips.