Series: Une Semaine de Bonté

I wear your love like an edible medallion
into the bucolic valley of the shadow
among drowsy lambs, Kalashnikovs

and opium poppies. All my hos
are calling hosannas because there are
no more bees. Photos of the missing

haunt the backs of milk cartons.
Whose slaves are they now?
Will their bodies ever be found?

I generate my own buzz, a self-
pollinating brand ambassador
hustling fleurs du mal.

Do you smell it, too:
the marketing opportunity for bee-
sized drones? I halve and pit

a free-stone peach and peer at that
footprint of a brain surrounded
by sweetness. I bite in.

Lion of empire every sun
must remind you of the veldt
the burning eyes of rivals
the bleats of prey but now
when you hear rain that’s
a crowd stampeding to escape
and when you hear thunder
that’s the big guns going off
and when you hear drip
drip drip drip that’s peace.

The song of the womb begins
on a minor key among the bivalves
and sea cucumbers, whose tunes
are all palindromes and serve
a purely decorative purpose.
The song of the womb sounds best
played by a full orchestra, despite
the many adaptations for solo flute.
It’s got rhythm—that probably goes
without saying—and sheet music.
It can be used to communicate
over great distances underwater.
Scientists say the song of the womb
may predate the evolution
of consciousness! It is not, however,
the first choice of the womb itself,
which prefers bossa nova
and the occasional hymn
for the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Fallen how? As bruised fruit, windfall—
an unlooked-for fortune? As felled tree
ready to be resourced into board feet?
No. It is we who have fallen into
our own trap, which we can’t keep shut.
She’s more resourceful than a bodhisattva.
Her limbs proliferate, as if
in an arms race with an octopus,
that other escape artist of the deep.
She practices anemochory.
Only the policeman’s black mustache
is better at improvising flight.

I died with the word I on my lips.
It only took a moment,
a slight pause as if for a line-
break or a comma, a panicked thought
or the time required for an 8-ball
to cross the baize. I died,
and the cities I harbor gave way
to squalid refugee camps
where the moon went
through a new phase
of never getting out of bed.
They fed it on thin broth
that tasted like a landlocked sea.
And there I floated like Moses
in my open casket waiting to be
adopted by Mother Earth—
to be somehow seen again, if only
by the mute-belled lilies of the valley
and their brawny, tawny bee.

In the demimonde they say rules
don’t apply; even the law of gravity
has been suspended. You can laugh

from the bottom bounce of a check.
You can float. Women are more
than ornamental: their arts are art.

A sailor spots his ship’s figurehead
on her way to a meeting of the board.
The glass ceiling hasn’t been shattered

but turned into a floor: like sea ice,
blue, translucent, prone to cracks
and groans. It will hold your weight

until spring, when the old order returns
with its dark fins and foreclosures,
its strip poker, its house that always wins.

Nature conspires with nurture again
and an infant, fresh from its watery Eden,
screams like a gull for your breast.

Sleep will elude me no longer with her silver tongue. I have bought her silence from a horned god: half goat, half lion with a banker’s dreamless fingers. His purse yawns open to take its paper medicine while she, my darling captive, stares past me, like no hollow-eyed face in the mirror I’ve ever seen. Perhaps there’s someone behind me, some rider, some mare. I don’t know. She’s not talking. And the room’s beginning to tilt and turn dark.

If travel were just
the open road, I might
take to it. Not this
labored labyrinth,
this intestinal clench
of visas tickets security screenings long lines wrong seats bad restrooms too much luggage no-fly lists takeoff turbulence recirculated air cramped legroom boredom soreness limbo purgatory sleepless wondering will they let us in turn us back demand proof of our identity confiscate our umbilical cords make us wait wait wait wait,
wherever we are bound.

I have held back my shadow
long enough, like a sheepdog
too long among the sheep.
It has learned only how to obey,
not how to bay for blood. I will stop
hiding it in the folds of my costume
like a chained watch.
                                               But what
is this conspiracy of a mirrored floor
to unmoor us and flood our secret
parts with light? What other
oppressive heaven has sent
this self-on-a-shelf?