White Hair This season is called white hair.—Charles Wright

Corn silk emerges from the husk, moist female hair,
up to one-thousand strands per ear, opening to
windblown grains of pollen.

This is sex in the cornfield, a cloud of possibility
until the remaining silks grow unreceptive
and we harvest the corn, stripping spent husks
and plucking off the leftover milky strands.

Though my head has not gone white, I grasp
the yellowed ivory handle of my grandmother’s brush
and pull its pale boar bristles through my hair
until I am haloed, filaments flaring out around me
with the static of each stroke.

In the Beginning

What alphabet, what words might they use,
those others living among the stars?
What bits of light may carry what they want
to say—if say is anything they do?

Perhaps, like those we call animals,
their claws are scratching lines in rock,
their bellies trailing sentences of slime
across some kind of vegetation
beneath a different sun.

Or maybe they are gesturing with digits
on their limbs—if limbs they have
and eyes to see them with—or rubbing
a cornucopia of scents on one another,
antennae twitching at chemical syllables.

Mind to mind, their thoughts may flare
like lightning blooming in the heavy dark
where even stars are talking to each other
in tongues beyond our range of hearing.

Go out tonight and, standing in the sky,
raise your arms to semaphore a message
or tie a prayer flag to a nearby branch
and ask the wind to translate.