A Toast

Drink this cocktail, made with muddled
grass blades, shaken moss, two
drops of the lake’s heart. Listen
inside the veins of a leaf’s palm
for the heartbeat of a root, and inside
the root, the syncopated rhythm
of a thousand grubs, pulsing beneath
the dirt, and below them, the soil
gives way to the broken-down bones
of animals long since extinct, never
pictured, not even in mythology,
their dinosaur teeth jutting from a humanoid
skull, their alligator torso held up by the tree
trunk legs of a bear, buried in this spot
before history, before the seed that crested
this eternally weeping willow that holds
the sky on its back. Drink up, see
your face in the sketchbook of its
branches, hear your voice in the spiraling
howls of an animal’s mouth sutured by roots.

____

Robert Krut is the author of Watch Me Trick Ghosts, The Now Dark Sky, Setting Us All on Fire, This Is the Ocean, and The Spider Sermons. A new collection, Oh Oblivion, will be published in 2025. “A Toast” is inspired by a painting by Linda Saccoccio.