Here’s the thing—God, you unimaginable it,
the very idea you could see/feel/intuit each sparrow
or each crenellated human brain with its
daily squalls, and that gesture like a fish trying to jump
out of the water it lives in, and all the time—that frantic,
and its folds and folds: What she thought of the yellow
flower that fell from the tree to the pavement outside,
the jagged sexiness of amaryllis on her windowsill,
the mustard seed she cannot swallow of all the cruelty.
Each jumping fish wants to swallow what it sees
buzzing past—dragonfly, rainbow. A computer so immense
it is all a pulsing, and whatever touches it even
glancingly is somehow marked. What sort of brain
could have conceived this or believed it even for
one amaryllis instant? I know the tongue I believe,
which is the mouth that eats and in the same instant
the mouth that flowers—this bloom each year
filling my windowsill with so much red I forget
almost how to breathe. God. God. God. I will brush
your unimaginable lips with my chapped pair,
bloodless now but still consumed with a memory
of that red violent, gorgeous, and brave
bleeding.
–
Sheila Black is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Radium Dream (Salmon Poetry). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, and elsewhere. She lives in San Antonio, TX, and Tempe, AZ, where she assistant director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at ASU.