Boy in the grass

Lightning charged the soil, he had told me, made it rich

and lying open for the till and plunging fingers.

Storms ripped to the roots of long grasses,

made them stretch deep through rocks, worms

and arrowheads, longer than each dry blade.

In a yellow stretch of prairie I explored his form –

muddled-colored eyes wide, wild

and helpless, shorts around his ankles.

Mosquito clouds and power lines split the air

with dull buzzing songs.

Even then I was remembering him, red shoulders,

fresh smell of sweat and hot wind.

And a maleness to the smell, alive-ness.

I held him in metaphor. I fed him to it.

Dangerous to mix up the real, flesh

with flanks of hill, sunned arms for red rock.

But that is, after all, natural,

to confuse, infuse bodies

with bright fragments like broken porcelain –

a sharp piece of song lyric in her room, long

past midnight. How the profile lined in white streetlight,

rain falling, reflects – as if between two mirrors –

splintered wet blue nights, fingers tripping down

forever unrolling keys, each note sweeter

and more mournful than the last.

Yellow and hot, the afternoon

was every afternoon,

laughing on my knees in gold-lit heat, high grass,

summers I was younger. Floating sparks – Oh,

poor loved bodies, pumped to bursting,

others’ impressions pressing in,

filling in the outlines.

Something bucked inside me, buckled.

Broke, on his slack mattress, in a white room.

But that matters less than when I took him

in the grass, in my mouth. My knees

pressed dirt hard and I felt it, or imagined

I felt it – fierce and electric, a burn

slicing through skin, deep.

Past metaphor, past memory,

into earth warm and waiting.