|
Maria Melendez
A Case of Apparent Apostasy Goes
Tidepooling
She
drapes the idea of God
over the anemone, puckered-in,
brown gob of flesh, grit of ground shells
glued on for cover from the sun. |
She
notes: |
Poke this god
in the center,
it contracts around your fingertip. |
Because
she’d placed uncountable Hosts
on outstretched tongues at Masses,
she tries stuffing hermit crabs into un-
furled anemones underwater; their arms wave,
helplessly excited, toward the crabs, until
clip of pincers is too great an irritation
to go on dissolving them alive. |
|
this god is light
green as a distant wish.
I can't get it to eat
|
She tries transforming God into
a sea slug,
a species which provides an ample basis for complaint:
their garish four-pound bulk, their guaranteed appearance
under any clump of sea grass lifted in search of stars.
But she has to allow, slug skin is beautiful;
rich as chocolate-colored window glass, or leopard-spotted
like a brown cowrie shell, or glistening like the dark,
frozen smoke in an obsidian.
|
|
This god has a rippling fold down the
lenth of its back.
slippery, pliable in my hands, bu my finger under the fold
feels a solid plate,
it's hidden shell.
|
She
wants to be led by God
as the much-sought orange sea star
curled in her tourist’s hands, raised high
to show the ranger watching from two thousand years away.
“We thought this species was extinct since ’64,”
the ranger tells her when she offers it to him.
She listens for the sea star voice to say,
in a sound corresponding to the heave
and sink of waves, “O ye of little faith.” |
| |
Notes, This god said put
me down, put me back.
|
Ars poetica
Here’s amor;
clawing the skin of sycamores—
Track it by the jagged patches of bare trunk
Exposed between pieces of broken bark.
|
|
Who
should you ask?
about the way love picks at the surface puzzle,
crunches away the discernable for the porous
inner wood; how did those clever natives know
boiled bark could treat a springtime wheeze
A little trial and error, sure, but mostly
the tree asked to be
used that way.
|
|
|
| |
We
offend the unused
trees when we don’t drink their remedies;
this love metaphor and its host, this sycamore
are curatives for the loneliness that repeatedly opens up
between ourselves and the Creator; to learn of love,
go to love, its unsolved path on a crooked tree,
and all it has downed or dropped
. |
|
|
|
Kick
the leaves
like parchment on the ground, shock the fat
black beetle with your thick toe,
rattle an inquest he can read, then listen
for what’s asking to be written. I’m no expert,
but the beetle seems to say: breathe out through your skin, feed
off decay and chew without redress–
|
|
|
Love breaks open the bark to
feed itself
on what’s exposed, while the gasping soil is fed
on what is shed. May language be an act of love.
|
|
