Purple Milkweed
I'm a dumb cricket on a stalk. Stamp
your foot, cricket. You know enough but
it isn't much. There's an awful lot of leaning
in this field, every time one of the winds says to.
Hard not to admire that unison, and the thistles'
bristling, none of them lonely. This bloom least of all,
with its five flipped cones full from half a drop
of juice, pushing out tendrils nearly invisible
to my clumsy eye. A good forty cluster into a ball,
a good four balls cluster on a single stalk—
so many cones and shoots lounging in juice,
and none of it needs me.