by Sarah Busse

Rosemary


1.
A more careful music begins.
Deep green and delicate
blue question of violins,
the surge, the swipe of oil
at the base of the thumb.

2.
Rub this sprig behind my ear
after dinner is done, the bowls clean,
and at the neck’s hollow, and here
below the breast and I will bring
this pungency, this urgency to bed.

3.
Now it grows to a shrub, grows in-
to a hedge, goes wild, standing
waves of a storm frozen
in a front yard heave like waves
of a nineteenth-century Japanese sea,

4.
tossed up never to fall, the spray
a glitter only in the mind’s eye.

-first appeared in Ash Canyon Review, Summer 2005