Stillness in a Low Time During the Rainiest Month of May in Half a Century

The cars approach and diminish but the road goes nowhere.

The storm stands across the street and says go.
Panic fans out.

The grass migrating without moving.

One blade bending to talk and the other
to listen … but to some other voice,

arriving from a distance. A voice with the tongue of a shadow
as if all this light traveling ninety million miles amounted

to a message smaller than a grassblade.

How small this poem must be in the field of minds!

I heard some people talking as they walked
across the wide green library yard, laughing

at a study suggesting that plants and trees
communicate. One bent his head toward the other,

whose face, angled away from the sun,
was obscured in the late afternoon shadows.