Green Men Don't Talk

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