Excerpt from Blue Heron
Cherimoya
The tongue conformed itself
around this large, glossy darkness,
a groove cut from its own kernel, whose tartness cut
the overwhelming sweetness of the tongue congealing
around the seed.
The very notion of sweetness, what is sweetness, how does the flesh
cloy to its core, the buttery white flesh
of the tongue.
It had no
meaning in itself, only that it gathered
and recorded the seeds to its milky, furred breast,
an embrace meant to
disclose that the tongue was ready and
redundant in its velvet pocket of flesh.
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Blue Heron
i.
The heron dies.
The food sent to his stomach
abets him no more.
His urine turns black.
But his face remains blue; his face
and its grizzled beard
have agreed to be turned thus
by blue hands
to the standard of the sky.
Those whose flight is stolen from them
still have this. So did his daughter
witness, collecting the glaze on the
discarded food, the rupture
of his heart, where she folded
a rib cage or otherwise
made a bed for the body
he could settle into. This shoulder,
this wing, this odious
resignation.
ix.
Whose is the rage
and therefore rage as proof
that this is, none of it, a dream,
even as it shimmers—
this disavowal of dreams, this
wanderer thrashing through the
path and startling the creature,
as proof that despair is
true, is justifiable, that the breach
is its own fact even when it releases, briefly
clinging from one to the other like
a fume in the atmosphere.