Poetry
I dreamt you were a honeycomb,
and I plucked bees out of
your sticky hexagonal cells
and popped them into my mouth
like striped, juicy candies.
I savored each exoskeletal crunch,
the gush of honey meat
beneath thorax and abdomen,
final plaintive plunge of
sticker-stinger into swollen tongue
and gum: you taste like fire feels.
I have put a Worry Eater on your bookshelf,
right beside your favorite books.
It may look like a simple wooden box,
but don’t be fooled: it is a Worry Eater
and the disguise is just so random visitors will
not know what it is and try to take it from you.
Worry Eaters are very rare and coveted things.
I should think the name should be self-explanatory,
but you must feed it daily in order
to keep your Worry Eater happy and full.
Feeding it is simple:
open the lid and whisper your worries in,
or write them on little scraps of paper
(lined college-ruled will do,
but the margins of old poems
make a special treat if you want
to do something nice for your Worry Eater.)
Some people may tell you,
“Don’t worry, everything will be alright,” but these people
do not have a hungry Worry Eater waiting at home,
so you can just smile coyly at them and say, “Yes,
you’re right,” and then go home and whisper
your secret worries to your secret Worry Eater.
In this dream,
you are the Sun,
and I am little Mercury.
I just ask
you let me
orbit as close
as I can.
I know
touching you
would set my
skin on fire.
We nest in waystations,
half split between lairs,
two larva devouring each other
to become a single beast.
We meet.
We crash desperate —
no hesitation before we
skin ourselves and unhinge.
This is the monster of us:
a spider of limbs, a knot of pythons.
We have too many teeth
and too many nails.
We are Chimera.
We predator and prey ourselves.
We crush sex until it pops,
a bubble red and full
of throbbing. We writhe wet
into each other. Too hot,
too steam, too slick —
we are half circles fulling,
fused at crown of mouth
and tangled genital root.
We suck air and thrust
swallows of fire down
into our needy belly.
We have a beard full of blood.
We have a throat raw,
a vessel wrestled empty.
One mouth gasps, the other growls,
we hoard our clenches; we worry
holes into our shoulders to stash them in.
We slip free, we scrabble back.
One mouth wails, the other shushes.
Your mouth
holds the night,
a dark full berry
in little white teeth:
bite down slow,
burst stars, juice black.
listen, love
listen
the rain hush-hushes
the wind shush-shushes
my heart rush-rushes
all lulls us into sleep
Heart, heart,
pump a sea of love,
pump a sea of life;
if you break, break clean;
if you mend, mend swift;
I require you.
You crash like wave
cerulean crash and blue
deep cerulean and white
foam crest and cerulean
you crash like undertow
cerulean, you pull me into you.
I dreamt of you last night.
Not you by name or you by face,
but you as the fever under my skin knows you:
The great red mouth opens wide,
the tongue works at the loosened tooth,
the tongue writhes in the brine barrel,
the tongue nails itself to the deck boards,
the cats pace hungry on the porch
for a mouth of meat.
The great red mouth
yawns down a quart of honey,
yawns down a quart of molten salt
what are you trying to cure?
what are you trying to preserve?
you end yourself trying but try —
I’m done trying.
In this dream of you,
I am the tooth; I rock in the gum,
declaring myself
with the copper not-blood taste of error,
with the bent angle bite,
with the wrong cradle, the wrong dock
for the incisor me.
Let me leap loose
from your great red mouth;
clench your jaw and I swear to god
I’ll crack and splinter; I’ll myself shear off
even if I leave my goddamn root behind.
Great red mouth
spit me out, wrench me out,
let me berth off in a bite of red apple
or I swear to god
I’ll abscess myself. I’ll eat you alive.
I’ve been thinking of how to fix the earth.
The front yard of this house is only sand,
an acre of desert where nothing grows up.
Rain runs off, elopes with the foundation
of the earth of my birth,
a river that eats
from doorstep to driveway,
and I wonder how long
before it takes this house with it,
how long before it takes me with it,
how long before we are swept into the street.
Today, I read a book about compost,
about eggshells and nitrogen,
about humus, pine straw, rotifers,
how broken things decompose
to bind themselves back together,
how decay has a health in it,
a secret science of lignin and bacteria
to rebirth the earth of my birth.
The book tells me patience
is the earth-tender’s friend —
take the slow years
for redworms and food scraps
to grow the soil before you
grow the seeds of grass and flowers —
but the only patience I have
is reserved for my own molder.
Anyway, rich soil won’t help
without a way to keep it in place.
Landscape is just as important:
gird the property line with stone and log,
tuck the trees into their beds of mulch,
clear storm drain and ditch so maybe
the next downpour won’t drown me out.
Erosion control takes retaining walls
just as much as it takes healing.