
Meeting of the Famished*
I
The train careens through the loom
of the underground, and she rocks
with its wrenching. Her blanket wrapped
loosely, her feet ballooning from peach
slippers, she stares down the core
of Nothing. I see the effects, the brown planes
of her face paled with the draining,
nicked and carved by the knife of Nothing.
She locks her eyes onto the air
as if it were a house
lost to flames.
II
I look at its teeth The teeth want to tear me to atoms I know my god and devil but they can't keep me from the white edges that grind No one else sees the eating thing It empties me I am food I sing against it I sing to myself
I
The train careens through the loom
of the underground, and she rocks
with its wrenching. Her blanket wrapped
loosely, her feet ballooning from peach
slippers, she stares down the core
of Nothing. I see the effects, the brown planes
of her face paled with the draining,
nicked and carved by the knife of Nothing.
She locks her eyes onto the air
as if it were a house
lost to flames.
II
I look at its teeth The teeth want to tear me to atoms I know my god and devil but they can't keep me from the white edges that grind No one else sees the eating thing It empties me I am food I sing against it I sing to myself
III
Passengers lean from her smell, the scent that stiffens their grasps on bars and hooks, that rubs up against them and lingers on their clothes, that hints of the body's abandonment. Her odor leavens my memory, and the old anguished blood clamors beneath my skin: There was a day when I almost stole fruit. Plums, cherries, mangoes the color of parrots-- sloped in hills of luster. I wanted to bite through to the juice, seizing all that the boat of my arms could carry, but urgency could not buy the dream of pulp and seed. IV When I return to her, she lowers her blanket. When I return to her, she is singing of sugar. Her voice, not the words, tells me that the season of sugar is always summer and lasts a sprinter's breath; that it crystals the tongue with a June-hail grit and dissolves there, in the heat held by the mouth; that the song of sugar belongs to the famished, and the dearth of sugar has cost this much to mourn. A quick smile crescents her lips, then falls away. Her trance resumes its vigilance. She is saying good-bye to herself. I am the unwilling witness, willing this not to be. V The next stop is mine. I step out into the surge of workaday—the hundreds slanting into hurry like crossed sabers. I am able to move through them, though a woman as hungry as I am has just pierced me for good. The train bears her onward; the tracks are clear. I bite my tongue and taste iron in my throat. A tailless rat hoists ripe scraps over the rails with delicate care. I climb the stairs to the melon-colored heat. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. |
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*2004 Lyric Recovery Poetry Prize winner.
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