Hunger’s the lesson best learned
from tasting with your hands.
Which is to say: before you
can eat, first you must skin
what refuses to yield, stoop
to plant deep in the soil
a branch or a seed that might grow
to fill the outline of your need.
Do you know what you really need?
I don’t either. All I know
is some days my longing is a wing
stretched bright across a quivering
spine. Some days it’s a road
at the end of which a furnace glows,
and not an inn on the way there
where the broth has not grown cold.