after Octavio Paz
Spring snows pink lips and you, beloved
plot of dirt, take me to your lily-of-the-valley bed,
rest my head on rising falls of flesh-drift
and mudslide. I reach for your fumbling finger,
you fill my gut with pebbles, roots.
Lift me from your lowland, count half-children
oozing from this body in the heat.
We’ve turned to our sacred-selves, stones
arranged as boundaries, barbed-wire gardens
protecting nothing but the early chive.
Have you noticed? We’re waxy, wrapped
in quilts of checkerberry. Pulled into your frost-
heave, I’m bitter in those snows of weeks ago.
Hyacinth pushes through sprigs of spearmint
and other invasive fears along your flank.
Flurries of white daffodil, handfuls
of crystal bonnet, fingernail-pinched and plucked
to bless my black-tipped frostbite.
I’m the only meat. Blood pudding on the broad
chest of your lawn. There are no feathers here,
no furs. In this verdant life, I sense the absence
of flesh outside myself. You’re my soil of many
textures, brown and green desire, composted,
light catcher of dust, my season without bees.
I turn you with a shovel, tease you with a smooth
oak handle. I’m perennial winter, dried herb,
and ours is impending vegetation, smoke
rising from a tree that doesn’t grow unless it burns.
Unfurl the naked fiddlehead of Christmas fern,
hooded Jack-in-the-pulpit. These petals haven’t
crystalized, my snows are not perfumed cherry blooms.
I pray, icicle tongued, to your peeping heads.
Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published by Indolent Books, and two full-length collections published by 3: A Taos Press – The Unbuttoned Eye and The Heavy of Human Clouds. His poetry appears in many journals and magazines including Lana Turner Journal, the Maine Review, the Massachusetts Review and Shenandoah. He is the recipient of a 2022 artist residency at Monson Arts.
