He devoured the fleshy orange
mango of her heart with gluttony a wild beast half crazy from drought. He didn’t care that he ripped her thin skin to get to the fruit. No- he sucked out her juice and spit out what no longer pleased him; left her remains to rot in the sun. |
“Any fool can get into an ocean . . .”My Vocabulary Did This to Me:
Jack Spicer
Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.
Leave books out in the rain
until pages swell like water on the knee hard to move or bend Dust infrequently until all I can see of the cat are her paw prints ghosting across the table top Forget the house-keys in the door latch and the poem that wakes me in the middle of the night to discuss the notion of ‘sticky not sweet’ something about a gull’s wings the sudden tack of mid-flight I hug everyone but you |
