the air is heavy like the breath you blew across my ear to tell me
that moss grows on the stoplight where I walk in sneakers whose 
holes allow the water to seep in, past trees dripping with lichen
the rainforest isn’t far from the valley between volcanoes, fertile

that’s how you see me, I know, as I sort my pocket change – enough
I once thought I could live inside your mouth and be whispers but
your tongue is no bed and the denim of my jeans caught your teeth,
we sink our feet in the dirt of the abandoned farm off route three

where the river cuts across an alluvial floodplain, millennia
of farmers in this valley have died in the shadow of the hills
snow peaks the mountains beyond and we both wonder if 
that’s where I’ll go when I’m finished here – up up into clouds