CROW’S SUGAR

 

I stole a watermelon from your kitchen. I must have been about 18. I’m thinking of a black-eyed angel.

 

The other boys said you wasn’t worth your salt if you wasn’t tasting me. I hid my virginity under my shirt. And that summer we sang

 

like we had azaleas bottlenecked in our throats when we’d catch a storm from the porch, our laundry swung on the muscular thunder.

 

A piece of me is corroded. Rigor or love in our small fingers— a sweet sort of choking.

 

The squash, the corn, all sweeter than antifreeze—I must have been about 18. I was full of your seed, and the lavender came down like a motorcade.

 

That summer was the summer God told me stars used to be audible. Does it have to be a full six octaves of guns between us?

 

A piece of me is corroded. Is submerged.

 

Stars hit high notes. Ella and everybody up there, throwing our heads back, letting the howl bloom upright—

 

They told me to drown your name in the second and third chorus of Ave Maria. Nobody told me to call the crows Sugar.

 

I must have been about 18. Back pew bridge to sorrow, wailing

 

if you wasn’t tasting me on clean linen on newly tarred roads if you wasn’t teasing me out on a string.

 

Ella and everybody up there wailing, I’m thinking of a black eyed angel, the dope boy in the attic. Marry me! I am full of your seed.

 

Once I stole a watermelon from your kitchen. You poured salt on and ate to the rind.

 

A piece of me is corroded. Leaves a stain of beets between my lips sweeter than antifreeze on newly tarred roads,

 

the lavender came down like a motorcade in spring.

 

My body was a carcass. You poured salt on and ate to the rind. But wasn’t there syrup once?

 

Wasn’t it sound, rigor or love? In our small hands crickets shuck the night & leave their skin.

 

My body was a carcass. Ella and everybody up there wailing. A sweet sort of choking.

 

I’m thinking of a black-eyed angel, the dope boy in the attic

 

innocent as Anne, as a wolf under the moon. Stars hit high notes. A full six octaves of guns. Wasn’t it sound?

 

I hid my virginity under my shirt. A stain of beets on our laundry after we went hunting with revolvers, kneading the dead through soil.

 

Sweeter than antifreeze. I am full of your seed.

 

I must have been about 24. Nobody told me to call the crows Sugar.

 

This summer a whale finchlike, eats from the uncoiled knot of my hand.

 

OMNIPOTENCE

 

She got sick even though the moon is supposedly everyone’s nightlight. I thought, Nessun dorma. My heart banged down the stairs like an anvil.

 

The sex in Venice tore open the curtains before dawn. Against your abdomen, my pelvis feels like a crucible. Say anything serious like chemo and I’ll respond with the follow up: Why don’t we move to Egypt andbuya bunch of camels? Why don’t we kick in the doctor’s teeth?

 

She looks like Pavarotti on stage sweating under the lights. She is all in her feelings, meaning it is for her survival. No… you definitely can’t translate the book of Jeremiah with a mouth full of painkillers but I’ve watched her sing. And sweat straight through my blazer, the one borrowed for the show she had to cut her hair like a boy’s. While you sleep in the big Venetian bed, I try the blazer on, unwashed months later, sitting in the balm of her clothes:

 

Fire tornadoes in Brazil make blind men see. Ice on the other hand is a small miracle. All she needs is a small miracle.

 

She and I are back in Luxor, and the mangoes are holding the bruise of youth green to their skin. You never think of the mosquitoes present in the soil, hunting the air, skirting along the water. You don’t think that mosquitoes will bite your feet till you can’t walk, so swollen and full is the fruit.

 

I tell you she is ill, and you hang me over your big arms and soothe me with geneticist words. You make me wet when you talk about hell this way. Except the lover you are pales next to the sex I had in Luxor, which was not sex really but a mango opened by the machete. I asked for the pit too. The half that was my sex, I kissed out with juice-stung face till I was crying and stoning myself at the same time.

 

 

I’M DRAWING A MAP WHEN I LOOK AT YOU

                                                           -for Javier

 

Love not as origin

 

but as exodus. A parting and then

 

another. Dust of your country

 

rolling off  like sweat or my name from your tongue

 

in the time you loved me.  That autumn

 

mosquitos ripened in the walls of your apartment

 

and made a border fence on my skin.

 

 

 

 

I became the robber whom you fed windows

 

fed me frame after frame: your silhouette

 

sleeping, silhouette cutting mangoes

 

silhouette with other ghosts—

 

 

Twice you were deported

 

 

before you made it to Nogales, alone and only nine

 

years old, saguaro shadows

 

pantomime. The owls flex against the sky

 

tiger sifts its stripes of sun and absence

 

making it day                                     then night.  I erase

 

 

 

and picture you as I always do,

 

more windfall than friend, more brother to me than fig.

 

 

 

Home como ancla, no como cadenas,           rather you as a worm, hooked

 

in a little fishing village by the sea

 

away from the desert calling

 

the iguanas Mother, though they could give you no suck.

 

I imagine you back in El Salvador,

 

 

 

gamblingat a funeral, dice stirring up dirt.

 

The legs on a pair of ghost roses clipped and joined to your lapel.

 

You won’t die now but you’ll be disappointed you didn’t

 

on a mushroom trip in a car of friends,

 

one Muskogean morning, wheels and wheels

 

and not a scream will break

 

through your lobster grin. Don’t lie and say

 

 

 

you’ve been here and loved this soil.

 

I am unfamiliar with any other images: you on a hill

 

in an ocean of tall grasses. You inside Alaska

 

with ice like chocolate around your mouth.

 

You in Montana under paperweight sky, land

 

flat as a pulse.

 

 

 

You plant kisses here

 

but don’t weed them.

 

 

 

Your bear-mouth

 

leaves raspberries  in my broken skin.

 

You’re playing

 

hard to get, Friend, and it’s getting hard on me

 

not to vacate my skirt and lift my thighs in this dry bed

 

of burned-up rivers. My neck is breathless unfurling

 

lungs into a map of where you’ve been.

 

 

 

If immigrating is loving two women,

 

which one of us do you dream in?

 

What’s another woman to the other woman

 

except an extra pair of hands to bring in the harvest

 

 

 

but I can’t take you home.

 

I’m not a coyote

 

 

 

that way. I’m the girl you guided through the reeds

 

down to the loading docks.  We lie on our backs

 

watch October get cut to pieces by helicopter.

 

 

 

I say, look out over the vastness and forgive it all.

 

 

 

In sleep last night, I pulled three boats ashore into your port. See the

 

rope burns, the labor

 

of trying to bring what you love close enough

 

to tie down  and then ride out

 

again onto the waves

 

assuring the land animal that appears in all your poems,

 

this time the mule doesn’t drown.

 

 

 

This time I don’t keep a vigil until you return.

 

This time you go and make it back to everyone.

 

And when we dream there aren’t oil drums.