After Noon

A risen dust of ferrous ions
covers my tongue, clean-tasting.
The ochre bag of sphagnum moss
spills its chocolate powder in the brick
corner of another summer
where the green hose coils in its caddy.
The lime?powdered Georgia marble?
is a sack too bright to look
back into, once you've dipped your cup
twice under the sun.
.............................At the whorled
unfurling center of the eggplant
a water-colored spider lives
on a silvery ball of water
trapped by the fur of the leaves.
Squash makes a cool house
of orange flowers. The toad
gulps slugs there, and the biggest
tomato ripens. Golden bells
let go of toothy flowers.
I bend down to greenness
and the voices of the dead are smells.

*Theodore Worozbyt has received grants from the NEA, and the Georgia and Alabama Councils for the Arts. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Alice Blue, 42opus, American Poetry Journal, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, Crazyhorse, Faultline, Hotel Amerika, Image, kaleidowhirl, Kulture Vulture, Mississippi Review Online, New England Review, National Poetry Review, North American Review, Passages North, The Southern Review and Verse Daily. His first full-length collection, The Dauber Wings, won the first American Poetry Review Book Prize and will be published in 2007. His chapbook, A Unified Theory of Light, is available on Amazon.com.