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A red bird has gotten into your mouth.
You have
argued with an enamaled box,
convinced
fire. Screw your eyes down on it,
squeeze
it against the underside of your mouth with your
tongue.
It hurts.
Hold the
live grease with silver tongs,
your teeth
are delicate jewelry,
your hinges
are fine smoke.
Its wings
try back there,
an entire
universe where your eyes are welded to jawbone.
You know
what you are doing, it is rust, it is craft.
A needle
scratches down into the chalk board.
Reach
into the pool of shade, over there, there by the fence
where the faucet’s leaking.
Reach down,
catch that little thing. A frog, lighting a pile of
sticks with the other hand.
The color
of its skin, let it prance; like a cooking fruit basting
in its own leaves.
Walk into
the colon, along its river through the reeds back
to Oasis, to listening,
listening
to the birds up there in the palms.
Your fingers
dangle into the cool pond.
Reach into
the mud below the rhododendron and fuchsias
for phrog,
fresh from
the trembling glass blower. Bend down, it happens
so quickly
… the legs
must have flexed, pushed away, he’s mid
air, mid
air, hopped from your hand.
The shade
takes him. Now you say phrog,
and only
put a glass bowl over an iron one.
Now you
say sunlight on water
but only
break the upper bowl and watch it fall in pieces
into the
iron one.
You have
argued up fire.
You, speaking,
but it was so fleeting it happened there between
the end of one word
and the
next’s beginning.
Fuscienne
is dressing, watching her movements in a mirror through a high, dark
screen. The dragons carved into it would fit perfectly if someone tested
them into the openings between themselves. The openings don’t quite
complete a picture of her, the mirror puzzle nearer than its solution,
only theorizing the bath-fresh scents. She will wear only a skirt, she
slips into it and ties the green sash loosely at her hips, draping her
print blouse over the top of the screen. The room trues light, using
nostalgia for criteria as she moves through a diffuse beam. The clusters
of highlights liven wood as the dragons twist and bite each other’s
tails, her fingers sliding down the story their texture tells. She steps
out, stops. Stops before she is completely out from behind the screen,
one hand still on the wood, her partial reflection startling her, its
color and roundness. I remember when Matt and I bought it, years ago,
picturing in her mind the little soapstone carving she wanted but left
behind. I set it back exactly in its dust print on the shelf. How they
tied the screen precariously on top of the car; how she held it down
by reaching out the window as he drove home. The mirror, her reflection.
I never realized how warm my arm looks. She moves to the side, watching
her bareness move fully out into the soft lining of light, enjoying
the slightness she could achieve by touching herself, earthen — a deep
seated beast labors before gold.
She steps
through the side door, into the garden, looks around to make sure no
one sees, despite knowing the garden is separate, like the well known
garden where privacy germinates and flourishes, maybe in a crowd, a
party maybe, and you turn observer, invisible, yet not gone. Someone
may offer you a drink. That now, that present, that ability was like
it was before anything ever happened. She goes through a small wooden
gate, walks back to the fence and squats where the dirt is wet, dark
as blood.
I can not
say dirt. And the moon and the god know where I can reach to hear it.
The air
smells like a freshly cut potato. She remembers the smell of cooking
broccoli.
I see potatoes
in a cheap wooden crate. It’s open, the lid leaning against one side.
I reach down into the smooth, cool potatoes, wriggling my fingers, wriggling
down into them till I’m wrist deep. I pull up a porcelain doll from
the potatoes. Her cheeks smooth and cold as if the kiln was not angry.
The air smells like slaves had been captive in it. She would give birth.
A small
tree with very large and glossy leaves droops down, down low over a
fountain, as if its limbs heavy with fruit, a leaf so floppy it scrapes
water. Scrapes water, moves back, scrapes brief grooves in the water
even though the air seems breathless! Her teeth grind slightly. The
leaves flash, becomes heavy slowly, flash, that hanging one dips, makes
a ripple, flashes. Her lips part. Every plant has a cave with a single,
measured drip. Fuscienne’s back, quiet as marble. The tip of a leaf
close to my cheek. The curved arm of a ventriloquist on a shelf in a
bookstore. She crouches over herself like she were a white hat floating
on a pond, fragrant compost doubling back to where sourness edges sweet
in the jaw, something below her making progress. Her white hand digs
into the mud.
She holds
a handful of mud, her arm moves in circles as she smears it around up
under her skirt.
He waded,
his machete cut circle and the reeds and the blackbirds. Bracken, brackish
whish. Whishen, whishened — he waded — he waited. He wished not, wishing
not at all. His rotted coin flashed like metal.
And the
ponderosa; vessel; funereality; black femora. Unponderable trip to the
sea. I can not say animal. I can say night path. I can not say fly.
I can not say sleep all winter.
Phrog.
I can not say wade. Ashamed, she washes, cleanses the insides of her
grateful thighs. From a distance she is a bather.
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