Petals

If you eat these petals, before retiring


Through properties as yet unbeknownst to modern science


Sight will be restored


Mrs A Clarke of Winnipeg saw meteors on


A new horizon, she thought the chariots had arrived


Short-sightedness completely cured


Mr Robertson of Manitoba saw, the grain of skin


Like an isthmus in his child’s hand


Held firmly to cross highway 26, sick with salted ice


From the woods near St François Xavier

Home where the fire was the orange


Of his mother’s tongue, strangely bright and black


With summer’s laughing frozen fruit


Spilled accidentally in the kitchen sink


Dishes high as Babylon


The far-sought malaise, gone in the panchromatic


Wilderness of criss-crossing lines


Sarah Clawson, aged fifty-four, of Mobile, Alabama


Insomniac and half-prayered with macular degeneration

Reversed the waterfall rush, the flowers broken


Steeped, in a kind of tea, with sugar cubes


She could still get, because the factory was old fashioned


A bitter taste, but despite the door quite crooked


Swinging freely in the jacaranda breeze


I guess, praise be, the frame’s bent too, she writes


In her thank-you note, vision now restored


The distortions in her peripheries


Where the dead once talked


Almost completely smooth, because


With a firm but gentle hand, the jags of fractures spreading


She crushed to sintered aromats


These falling petals