there is nothing you have ever grown that isn’t music.

You are the bamboo in Coltrane’s saxophone reed.

The mulberries that fed the silkworms

that made the slippers for the ballet.

The pine that built the loom that wove the hemp

for Frida Kahlo’s canvas. The roses that dyed her paint

hoping her brush could bleed for her body.

Who, more than the earth, has bled for us?

How do we not mold our hearts

after the first spruce tree who raised her hand

and begged to be cut into piano keys

so the elephants could keep their tusks?

The earth is the right side of history.

Is the canyon my friend ran to when no one else

he knew would echo his chosen name back

to him. Is the wind that wailed through 1956 Alabama

until the poplar trees carved themselves

into Dr. King’s pulpit. Is the volcano that pours

the mercury into the thermometers held under

our tongues. The earth takes our temperature,

tells us when we are too hot,

even after we’ve spent decades denying

her fever. Our hands held to her burning forehead,

we insist she is fine while wildfires

turn redwoods to toothpicks, readying the teeth

of our apocalypse. She sends smoke signals

all the way from California to New York City—

ash falls from the sky. Do you know the mountains

of California used to look like they’d been set on fire

because they were so covered in monarch butterflies?

Do you know monarch butterflies migrate

three thousand miles using only the fuel

they stored as caterpillars in the cocoon?

We need so much less than we take.

We owe so much more than we give.

Squirrels plant thousands of trees every year

just from forgetting where they left

their acorns. If we aimed to be just half as good

as one of the earth’s mistakes,

we could turn so much around.

Our living would be seed,

the future would have roots.

We would cast nothing from the garden

of itself. And we would make the thorns proud.

THE DAY PRINCE DIED

Everyone said you were his biggest fan.

You never did. You loved his music too much

to ever think no one could love it more than you.

You’d talk about his vocal range for days,

how he could start a note in one galaxy

and land it in another, how he discovered planets

with his songs. Planets where the lakes were lavender,

where the wind made the sound of a B-side hit

on vinyl, where everyone was six inches shorter

without shoes. In high school, you’d sneak out

of Iowa and drive through the dark to concerts

in his home at Paisley Park. By the time you were eighteen,

you knew more about his drummer than most people

know about themselves. When we met, you were saving

pennies to take red-eyes all over the continent

each time someone in the know said he’d be gracing

the stage of some tiny venue at 3AM in Chicago,