FRIDA III

“Things are not as they appear to be.

Nor as they don’t appear to be.”

– Frida Kahlo

I create you to give you

color so you can paint -

paint us, an idea of us

more detailed

than our locked reality

I am the artery

You are the earth

The stink as arteries

thorn into earth

And I make it so –

I make it so accessible

A nip, a snip

Tissue of rock

Spiney teeth

Toothless spine

The love of my body

beating away –

miscarrying its way to you

Its seed bearing

sweetspot – overlapping spirals -

The resin runs round me

as it runs

out

NEAR CORFU

Sloped in

Cephalonian crag -

Caked with olive trees,

gray green leaves,

small pale lobes,

her hidden place.

She slides in, bit by bit.

First a toe, an arm, a leg,

under a leg, an ear -

away from village tongues,

their knots, their spit,

this cruelty of closeness.

*

And the land becomes a map,

geology the way in

geography a way out,

as she bakes

into the island soil,

into the limestone

piked and chewed

for olive pressing/ olive

dancing.

*

Tomorrow, the oil

will slowly rise,

to cover the bread,

anoint the sick,

to fill the lamp

and float the cork,

and as the cotton burns

and the fire goes out,

seven priests will whisper vespers,

and line a glassy cross on all the palms,

and all the heads, the cheeks, the chin

of the bowed and begging women.

“Almost anything you do in the garden, for example weeding, is an effort to create some sort of order out of nature’s tendency to run wild. There has to be a certain degree of domestication in a garden. The danger is that you can so tame your garden that it becomes a THING. It becomes landscaping.

In a poem, the danger is obvious; there is natural idiom and then there is domesticated language. The difference is apparent immediately when you sense everything has been subjugated, that the poet has tamed the language and the thought process that flows into a poem until it maintains a principle of order but nothing remains to give the poem its tang, its liberty, its force. Once the poem starts flowing, the poet must not try to dictate every syllable.”

–Stanley Kunitz

The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden