In Which We Sense That We Are Not Alone
       

Various miracles of the most outlandish sort,
and nothing was too heavy to carry.
We had to crouch in the bushes with our nets,

so to speak. Unfurl our maple brown
hair with less caution. They lined me up again,
and the shabbiest bee ever created fell

into a cup of lemonade, almost finished, but not.
The lesson here was supposed to be in
pragmatics. My supporting materials long gone,

left behind the tree where you stripped
pieces of bark for our lunch spoons, then every
centimeter of cotton and microfiber,

faux lace made with care by a robot in Thailand.
Somehow, a hole in my butterfly net.
The scandal! Chaos in the conservatory, or else

just an extra ripple in an experimental
holding pond. Somewhere a bride tumbled off
the bejeweled saddle made for a pony

but stapled onto a sawhorse for safekeeping.
Our love was more like the ultraviolet
lamp my teacher let me demolish after class

when it suddenly ceased being a lamp.
There was absolutely no word for any of this.
When I say it was no longer a lamp

I mean that it became something of a god.
The trees dropped their trash upon us.
We celebrated with our guns, or lack thereof.

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Copyright © 2014 Mary Biddinger All rights reserved
from A Sunny Place with Adequate Water
Black Lawrence Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission