Perhaps because I know how salt
is paired with flame and flame’s a welt
that licks the skin with thorn and bone,
I’ve always loved what knows to fold
the piquant tendril in the sweet—
ginger with anise, torn basil with lemon,
the iron bite of bitter gourds lingering
long after summer berries have left
their juice and stain on fingers, lips.
Reptile-skinned melons blush orange
like daylilies at their core, and the moon’s
poor copper in exchange. Once, I spooned
a tincture of jasmine flowers and my mouth
transformed into an old cathedral
against whose rose-veined marble walls
sheets of candle smoke lifted, swirled.
Once, I slipped thin slices of the carambola
on my love’s tongue, so he could understand
how some stars burn greener in their
passing. Shake the purple rind of the grenadilla,
the yellow globe of the maracuyá— the audible pulse,
the ticking seeds: exquisite sweet, waiting to explode.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Happiness
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Grenadilla
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Reprieve
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Assassin’s Wake
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Noon Prayer
- Acompañamiento
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Storm Warning
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
- Veneer
‘ Once, I spooned
a tincture of jasmine flowers and my mouth
transformed into an old cathedral
against whose rose-veined marble walls
sheets of candle smoke lifted, swirled’
All sumptuous, these lines especially.
Thanks, Lucy! Always good to hear from you.
Rich all the way through… The one Lucy mentions is the most surprising, but I also think the reptile-skinned fruit containing tiger lily blush is a neat twist. And the whole evokes that lovely feeling of unpackaged abundance one gets walking around in a tropical market.
I absolutely adore this. It is partly the tropical fruits, things I have only seen in pictures or merely read about in old recipe books. But I can taste and smell them. How wonderful!
I’ve seen carambolas (star fruit) at local grocery stores recently — and a few other fruits I do wish I could bite into on a more regular basis, except they put such a high price tag on them! But yes, Marly, nothing like an open market…
I love the way you write about food. You should consider writing a whole collection of food and cooking poems!
I *have* thought about that, Dave… and I may teach a short workshop in mid- or late fall on food and poetry. Grin.
Cooking lessons in between writing lessons? That would totally rock!