DANDELIONS

I once dissected dandelions:
straplets and ligulets
scattered the nut-brown bench
with golden swarf.

Their downy seed-heads are
translucent spheres:
frosted-glass architecture, carved and crumbled
by a breath to nothing.

The dark green fleshy stem,
tense as an Indian,
coils apart when split,
oozing white juices.

Covering lawns with doubloons
set in whorls of bracts;
dark in their stems and jagged leaves below--
armed with harpoons and bearing golden shields,
the dandelions haunt the borders of our lives.
