Buller Greenhouse

by RACHEL BURLOCK

I am humming in
your glass and fading colors,
corn smell on the clicking air.

Your climate is increasingly                                                  
difficult to lasso—

what does this interfering
human life sound like
to you? We saw

from the footbridge
water melted in Grand Forks
rush the icy distance
back to us, we
re-entered a fortress

of cold. We hover pressed in wool
between panes
of a bright feeling.                 

Your elderly cactus
wears gray streaks like
river’s ice,
reaching slowly for    
the light
caught in dresses.       

We are here because unthinkable
plant lives began

scattering
oxygen everywhere.
Their early soft
bodies
never formed fossils.

Temperatures bowed
to the sudden explosion
of many new species:
we can only read the gaps
through history
like Sappho
in its winter bed, imperfect
with so much imagining.

And we've forgotten,
whispering our pencils to paper,
the soft-veined                       
leaves.

In their limited hours
your plants are teaching
and working. They flower in the reflections

raising an educational arm
to dusty windows
and lifting sun.