Bread

Beyond the salt, beyond molasses and yeast,
the feral smell,
beyond the four corners of the house, beyond
the patch outside our front door, the furthest country
the fragrance of my loaves could claim,

into the dark dense caverns of the loaves themselves,
into the cramped temple cells where the priests
led each grain of sugar trembling and devoured it,
the consort's vaporous sigh, into all that I kneaded,
I pushed and stretched.

All the quick salt slice of that winter the loaves rose,
ascended from ash, were lords.
In our house the loaves were lords
we indulged, like babies, they were unblemished.

The loaves never started awake in the middle of the night.
They never cursed without words, but yawned
like lazy cats, unspooling their skeins of heat
into our mouths, the spongy softness of bread
like a kitten's tongue in our throats.

Into the ice-threshed night the loaves hunted,
down the long muscled alleys,
through the street's rough poundings and risings they hunted,
they found us,
they loved us,
they washed us clean.

Welding

And if all the beasts in Christendom turned in one breath to desert me,
and the scavengers plucked the last thread of flesh from my fingers and hopped,
reeled drunkenly to finer debaucheries, and if the grass withered
and the earth opened and even the approbation of the sun was no longer mine,
gravel and red clay and fine silica mists,
if every trace of my granular ramblings and crystalline showers of doubt
sifted through the sieve of our hot-breathed children’s memories
and leached down through the bedrock of family legend
and crumbled away forever,

would you go?

A tiny bird's leg we found
guarded by an old woman
the jackal's gnaw of time
gouged her face, though youth
had returned and rutted there,
insatiable, pawing its hooves
in her rapturous smile.

"Look," she said, full of portents:
this horn of claw
this length of bone
this scabrous hardness of flesh
all foretold our wealth and potent minglings.

I laughed, but not you.
Not you.
You squatted in the dirt.
"But how, mother," you begged.
"How will I find her,"
fierce flashings in the breast,
"after?"

After the mud-raked hills and the gasping of the fish
After the berries' juices have drained
And the aluminum flesh peeled back,
the soul still dripping.
After the cymbals' deafening crash
announces the end, I will know you.

Stripped of your power,
fluid,
blind,
destitute,
with no hands,
with no voice,
rubbed free of pretense
I will know you.

And all the chafing of my palms,
your jackhammer shout,
the thin tremolo sawing of my tears;
all the whispers and the long draughts of silence
the scars of two souls welded and joined
all the pangs and twinges and little heartaches
of love will not have been in vain.

My God, Again

My God, again. Again I am lost
in this vortex of loving you.

And this hunger drawn taut
and arched like a bow above my stomach, catgut
stalking the long scowls of sewage
and strangle-fisted skies in search of food,
this hunger is nothing

but a disguise, distracting me
from the abalone sliver that flashes
in my chest, my heart staggers,
unfurred and blinking,
driven straight through.