Sister, I am in ten pieces ten miles apart: a cricket sleeps in one fist; my penis snuggles with slugs under the mandrake screen; my knees repeat one struggling word along the sandbar; tree-moss braids my crawling hair; and this tongue — a succulent, fallen leaf. If you step into a trap of clean ribs and one breaks loose, take it for a wand and dowse until you find the cloudy spring that gives back my true face.
Crush pokeberries in your palms, since they yield the color you love your days most in; come rub my cheeks and lips with your moist earth sign. Love my days since I recreate yours in kind: I love how your sense brings you out into the rain to shimmer with the grass, the trees and long hills. Tomorrow I will show you a lizard’s skeleton washed clean, and a mushroom as impure a blue as heaven: its milk is indigo, bruising slowly green; it will nourish us, both sky and sea.
That wild patch of wolf hair at the root of your waving spine, that platypus in your crotch, part waterbird, part bright fur — what are these animals you stand for? You came to me first walking invisible beneath a green dress, your hair crouching behind your head. Playing for you I held my flute like a blowgun. And this spill of hair sleeping on my chest, I wonder what pelt it may be — while you sleep I whisper its fables. Awake, you turn on me: what is this breath of fire?
