O Common Buckeye on the ground
or stitched to wind: dirt-shaded
door to 450 million years,
I didn't know. Crows
play their scrapers, ants increase
their data, on my single
footpath I found out:
how you are another here,
hills beiged. Your purple
eyespots glow like lamps
in cannabis, stare
like the price of gas.
A California, combustible,
party where the earth
comes apart. I looked you up,
you were glued to US letters,
24 cents. Gray pulse
I put away. On my table you
were the knife left
untouched. Months
I walked room to room
in hills blown through by wind
full of machines,
moving. My shoe soles molded
in China, while you worked
on four furry wings lightly
as parentheses, ancestors
having aimed you at nectar
in the yellow flowers before
they reach the change.
Butterfly hidden in hills color by Dan Alter | Poetry Reed Diffuser
$15.00Price
Dan Alter is the author of two collections of poetry: My Little Book of Exiles (Eyewear, 2002) winner of the Cowan Poetry Prize, and Hills Full of Holes (Fernwood, 2025). He is also the translator of Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited (Ben Yehuda, 2024), from the Hebrew of Yakir Ben-Moshe. His poems, reviews and translations have been published widely. He works at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley.
