I.

            I have been fortunate
            to know men's bodies intimately
            To touch a peeled orange with a tongue

            In the day there is heartrace and stargrace
            In the night there are palms wet like fire.

            I have been fortunate to know men's bodies
            To cradle hips white oleander

            My arms lopped off with frozen scissors.

            I have been herded all at once into kennels
            of shaven sheep that groaned in wind

            While the ones that stayed behind
            were enviously old,

            My mother's eyes become
            plump black plums.
            

            II.

            I have never fucked a mother
            or a sister
            But brother let me tell you
            how to scat.

            We are all born buried
            waiters
            upside down in an ocean of hemp.

            In a manger's clay
            we bury grief hatchets
            to help you win a steeplechase of grace.

            I have never fucked a mother or a sister,
            But I have fucked, a sister and a mother.

            Broad reflection no refraction
            I have covered you fast as scissor legs

            Loved how light held your melon hips
            My lemon pubis shredded your glass eye.

            Leafy sprouts were the fastest gifts I gave you
            Until nature let me bleed a different color.
            

            III.

            A thespian, I have watched
            your three comets

            crater Venutian shores

            I swallow I swallow your feathers
            O why can't my hand get around you?

            My throat blankets your trachea
            Roves nipples' bleak sable patina

            I love your white house
            of belly

            Because it boarded me,
            mindful of no one else.

            This, my turtle shell
            are your ribs

            Albino cradle
            hollowed out
            like a murdered bird.
         

            IV.

            A whinnying sigh
            Everywhere following,
            I am always swallowing
            arid landscapes inside.

            Sullen, I desert you
            Rise and shallow dive
            To mount your tips
            A hummingbird landing in absinthe.

            Lest your body inter me I build
            my sick home on higher ground
            In a mound of oysters and horsehair
            are my cockleshells and bells on lookout always

            But your beacon rounds me out
            Routs bones, gently crackling
            toes, nose, hips,
            even though I don't have a sister.

            You could loan me one of your three
            - One slowly knitting
            setting her apples in a toolshed
            - One unsettling, climbing Everest
            - The other milking August for millificent
            hayseed, dandelions and suckling pigs.

            Over the course of our two landslides
            I ask you to grow
            a lake of sulphuric innocence
            to know the magnificence of women

            I have come to know
            men's bodies,
            purpling like the others
            that drown by the wayside

            A pomegranate, a sonnet,
            a senator, a planet:
            I know your body infinitely
            like a wound winding around Golgotha.


Copyright © Juli A.Kroll, 2002.  All Rights Reserved.