THE BODY IS A HOST OF WANT
It's elemental. Dragging itself across
with furry haunches, the eating beast slimes
the linoleum, sticks its fingers in your grandmother's hair
and opens its gullet for pennies. Feed me copper it shrieks,
and you do: watch the hard coins go swallowing in.
You can see its mouth cancer bared in its teeth,
the woven tissues of the soft palate flaring
against each other, swollen as the uvula. It looks wet
like the insides of a pomegranate, wet where
the membranes between the fruit's seeds
can come together like a star, their center
such a small throat. You think this must be
what Persephone saw when that same fruit was cut
for her handnot a face, as in Hume's pareidolia,
but a throat, and a mouth, and that delicious
compulsion to put one mouth to another.
Persephone, don't! you want to say, this will cost us
many summers, this will bring your mother's sorrow,
this weds death to us all. But that hulk of instinct
is already lumbering nearhere are its parting jaws
and you know too what it feels like to forget
how a hibiscus can open, how the thistle looks
like a brush, painting persimmons.
You know what it is to forget chicory.
And because Persephone feeds, so do you:
each seed (each taut root you love) slides down like a fish,
becoming fish, empurpling the throat through each
esophageal stricture, waved into the progress
of a swallow, they drop down the canal
a garden whirling in the stomach's sea.