Prose, I say, Plasma

The night we both do not sleep, I tell you, The body is an overturned pail
of bees. And you say, The body is a patch of caraway. The chickpeas soak,
the recipe for hummus waiting as most wait, on the countertop, like careful

news. In the morning you find a purple onion, an avocado, Cartesian, you say,
the quartered remains of a tomato and we eat all things eversible and holy
in the form of an omelet. Food: the only entr'acte for us, isn't that the way

of it? The body, the bees, each demiurgical kick enough to sweeten
our hapless honey-lack. Prose, I say, Plasma. Give me something endogenous,
and all you can do is tend those precious sounds: André Segovia,

the bucket on the ground almost angry with onomatopoeia, what
you will still call, years from now, my rigamarole—beauty—among
the calla lillies, every spade the obscurant and rightly so, my love.

Here it is afternoon, and we have just begun to haunt our ideas
of each other, saunter by, the bodies we trade in every now and again
for talk, for appetites, for window-view. Here we glee in paronomasia,

our forms of humor slowly colliding until the wide sun settles down,
each limb a given axis, more to do with tongues than speech. But say
the lentils, celery, carrots, minced garlic, cilantro, say they speak

calumny, it is here in the valiant stalk of your body, the tender
petals, Unmeasured ingredients, give me anything Aeolian. Darling: soon
we will be able to sleep, we will pour olive oil into the sea.

Copyright © 2006 Susanna Childress All rights reserved
from Fugue
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission