Green is the Orator by Sarah Gridley

Coming to the Festival of the God of Boundaries
    Helios the mute, the keen in Pan’s knife.
    Some time critical at the bending stream, where he cuts the reeds
    at staggered lengths and with the beeswax
    begins to bind them.
    Beneath the humanly shaped air is an animal’s
    report of feeling.
    Then for the first time saying
or
.
    Turning your instrument toward the tree, all the training comes up
    as something just below your skin, yet within the business
    of the sun. You could be readily alone,
    you could be difficult to reach or speak to,
    at present included in the subsoil production, where Mercury
    scythes the head off Io’s warden, Argus, whose every hundred eyes
    under the messenger’s messenger voice
    caves to a slumberous feeling.
    In such a beautiful piece
    for reeds, it is all ears under the architected
    bridal veil, our trinkets working to the surface of earth.
    The earth, too,
    and moreso tidal, tidal in the congregate
    shifts of grazing, tidal in the turn of plow, itself a substance
    for the moon’s compactments.
    Her own voice frightens her. In lowing hearing herself low.
    Her father feeds her grass, swats a fly
    from her eyelash.
    The border completely herbaceous. Quantities of sun
    later to be crushed from borage.
    To wedge a story inside a story. To cut the trunk radially.
    Argus, whose every hundred eyes heard Syrinx running
    into sound, Syrinx being chased by everywhere.
    Staggered lengths of story.
    And does the god have a mind of his own,
    Pan in the needles, the unthinkable pine wreath,
    a ubiquity darkly seductive of breeze?
    Along her various edges, between obvious and audible and covetous,
    the rarely dissected textures, fog is condensing into water
    on the hardened forewings (shards)
    of darkling beetles.
    For the reinstatement of a hundred eyes, the covert feathers
    snapping into courtship.
    Now you: you now.
    If affluence
    speaks into the mouth, if the very long dead exceed our energy?
    In the room adjoining the living room, the offer to play
    the nocturne over.
    You now: now you—

Makes an Arrangement
    Of many stems, the water, lukewarm, the water whose irenic ladder down
    to a slant clip in going giving to the stem a greener opening
    who gives a period
    and gives to live in lost continuation
    of oneself, sticks caught
    in peace of stones, in clouds shaped as a windpipe
    at a no more foreign accent
    true in the woods
    there is in trillium, a wild against the skin
    and body the very gesture could be true, body drawn truce
    in the pencil-looks of life, from nature
    drawn and made of water—drawn of rush, copper, salt—of flowers the earth
    why not bestows
    what makes me know
    in a faucet hue, could silver
    warm to be a hue (to bird down, beauty, hide)
    time and water rooming
    in the ewer base, then you (good
    god) is true, and futures on the glass of flower cooler, and past,
    a glass (in time comes in), a second-seeded eucalyptus, and drops
    on glass, and split-off thoughts, on cooler door,
    diminutives of mass—
    the molecules, the hand-shaped streaks

Return of the Native to the Widespread Hour
    In her yellow caravan, the feather merchant has sold out of wares.
    Ambitious only to feel her coat’s inner lining, in performing one
    normal action backward, she sublimes, she goes beneath
    the oldest stone, she greets the interruptive
    shake before duration.
    Breathe on a harpsichord, and it will sound.
    Sink a chunk of salt on your tongue to name the ocean.
    The swan’s distinctive contour will pinpoint the sky.
    So her resources are wanting to reach her:
    knowing with a red cloth tied at her neck
    where leafage is system to leaves.

Midlander
    this region that moves the voice is made of ears
    so that a region we are born to
    sounds like listening and we seem even older
    when we speak this way—like a glow of clay compressed—light
    as the hiddenness of the nonapparent
    sun being wind along the leaves—among pieces of recognition—
    bootprints