Along the road, delicate blue
trumpets with pink buds
and hairy, flaring stamen.
Tiny nettles on the stem, because
the blueweed doesn’t want me,
it wants the bee, wants it
the way the wind wants to move.
I saw a sign, PRIMITIVE
YOUTH CAMP, and I was
wading through culverts, poking
the matted fur of dead cats
caught in the brush. Primitive
youth: my first cigarette
at Girl Scout camp, its jolt
of nicotine, the alternate
world I hadn’t known of. I lay
in the tent, something roiling
and pitching, besides my
stomach, something dislodged deep
in the spirit world, something like
a bee: nearsighted, but
picking up ultraviolet. When I knew
I was not my body, but that we’d go on
wanting each other forever.