The sky was white-knuckling it. We
had just come off the road, and our unconscious, though
once weeded, plowed, and planted, had long since gone
to seed. Behind the guest house, pumpkins dangled from
the root clump of an uprooted oak, the hillside greened
with rye grass. “I bet rabbits come here,”
a woman said, tipping her hat to another woman going to
fetch the paper from the box. Penned dogs spun in circles,
an expression of canine disbelief. We offered our upturned
fingers through the wire. “I’m glad it stopped
raining,” several people said. “The road is
slickest in the first few minutes of rain,” we were
reminded, our palms still bearing the steering wheel’s
lines and warmth. “Is there a judge here?”
asked a man in love with verdicts. “Should we settle?”
Duplexes
jutted against ranch-style homes and farm houses behind
prickly shrubbery pocked with berries and slowly sunk
into the overgrown fields of volunteering rhizomes and
the trees that fenced them. Sometimes babysitters thought
they saw the children of whom they were in charge slipping
down the throats of persimmons. A record harvest followed,
and a large cash reward was offered to anyone who found
children shriveled inside or snuggling happily next to
the damp pits. Grown folks got slurped into navel oranges.
During planting season, grieving parents and lovers joined
forces and choked the neighborhood with orchards in hopes
of stepping outside one morning to find the faces they
used to kiss ripening, reddish in luminous foliage. The
sky loosened, and color seeped back into our dirty hands.
Mountain,
Table, Anchors, Navel
after
Jean Arp
Red
neckties silk the mountain. You and I sulk at the table.
The Vaseline won’t release our anchors. Cormorants
feed from the fishbowl of the navel.
You
read the salt on my table. It must have been left from
too much handling of anchors. I sleep on the banks of
the navel. When you put on your hiking shoes, your spine
rises like my favorite mountain.
We’ll
have to take feathers for anchors. Clip the wings of the
navel. Else we’ll have to follow it up the mountain.
Coax it down to the head of the table.
How
long must we knock at the shuttered navel? We live in
the gray of a lead mountain. Leave its shades at the table.
Cut the anchors.
The
mountain and table drift from the port of the navel, and
the anchor hatches in the cormorant’s mouth.
