Matter

Words like presence, beauty, and sorrow
don't speak to me any more.
They are ghosts searching for a body.
Only a hyacinth seedling clenched
in her bulb of groans, unfurling
a fury of birth and praise from the glint
of minerals in odorous loam,
a death of old wings in her fist,
suffices to express for now,
not abstraction, but a hunkering
of emerald in sod, poised like a prayer
to leap for the sun, and fly.
so in my final breath, as in my first,
let there be Matter, and its cry.