POEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE FROM DARWISH

                     by Adam Clay 

And the poets wrote down the daliness of their purple flowers,
found weeds crossing unseen boundaries
of apple trees, flecks of bark bearing scars of some
invasive pox, some cracked door past history
and into another spider sac of lies. Without the desire
to fall back into the firefly light, the poets withheld
their voices with the weight of their wild
and gnawing desires. Truthfully, the flowers were neither
purple nor daily—in fact, there were no flowers
at all, as if thunder makes summer only inhabit
the mind and the mind only inhabits its lonely
sense of pleasure: its crooked and certain song.

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