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Salt
on Skin
for
Ami
I quit America for a sabra,
who emptied a shelf and swept sand
from the basement we shared
with her seamed and slender grandma.
She taught me Hebrew
and I followed her up mountains
to watch goats graze, through the Negev
where earth cracks, sun screams
and the body becomes a bruise.
She showed me how sweetness grows
inside a cactus, but I had to strip it down.
I had to know the needles.
That summer I promised her I’d be a poet.
I returned to Ohio and found Whitman
and Thoreau. She gave me
the desert with its savage song
where a cactus needs almost nothing
to grow. Like salt on skin.
published in The Prairie Schooner (2008)
I’m
up to my nipples in lake
filled with a new language
that speaks through me
like a hand crawling
into my chest, fondling my breath,
composing my heart’s beat,
repainting my blood
a kind of aquamarine.
My nipples swell
like the time they dripped with milk
and life depended on them
the way soil depends on the worm
or the tide is pulled by the moon.
That suckling sensation, not unlike
the quiver from the lover’s tongue,
brings me closer to everything wet.
I plunge my head, break
this crystal and crack
each ripple of water into light,
rocking tiny pebbles
in their sandy cradles below.
Ducks hear that shatter,
search for a runway
and dunk their filthy bills.
Mosquitoes hover, dancing just above
the place where sunlight dissolves.
One pesky insect reaches my skin
before water does
and steals my blood,
carrying the color of aquamarine
as it jumps back into air.
When I step from this lake,
my nipples will soften in the sun
and my poems will flow like milk.
from
The Common Fire (Red Hen Press)
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