After that dream in which I kill someone
or someone kills me, I start to see
the Green Man: his leafy face,
his clothes of vegetables and vines,
his foliate head carved in an old church door
and in a bookplate, oak leaves sprouting from his ears.
I see him in the supermarket, thumping
watermelons. He sports a mustache of asparagus.
At the beach, wearing seaweed boardies,
he hangs ten off the nose of a shark. In the restaurant,
he chomps celery stalks, his putrescent jacket covered
with lichen and mushrooms. At the park, an arbor vitae
breaks loose from its hedge and stumbles toward me,
holding a bottle of ale in an outstretched branch.
“Green Man!” I shout. “What do you mean?”
But green men never speak. And so, I drink
with him on a splintered bench and fall asleep.
Published in Star*Line