Now is best described as not quite rain,
rather mist falling, or water filling air.
Both slugs were strange to see,
stranger to poke with a stick,
strangers to dry weather.
The flesh of slugs is slimy yet undoubtedly flesh.
The leaves here are green like a motherboard.
A piece of technology hangs
from a wire wrapped around a branch—
its insides are the colour of leaves. The green
should overwhelm but the streetlights
(and the cobwebs they illuminate)
are a greater violation: white ought
to be a camera flash, a moment capturing itself,
leaving without leaving behind.
The green is making peace with
the white and the black sky. The white
is an afterimage with no “before”:
no spider taking responsibility,
no memory whatsoever of the streetlight
as unassuming glass. The slugs might
still be alive, but it is hard to know for sure.
The tree and its fruit are the tree—
I and my fruit am I.
My leaves and my fruit are green.
I know the feeling of water hitchhiking on my clothes.
I know how to be a series of planted things
displaced, fading into distant dots.
I also know how to be more than a thing.
Maybe it is better for us
to say that we are planted afterimages
and we stand alone, together. And we are, and are
nameless, slithering towards expression,
not words but eyes filling space.