Becoming Desire
Grandmother’s garden always lured:
blue-black tulips, glistening bruises,
unsubtle blurting poppies. Prone
as her peonies after rain, I lay waiting
to feel their exhalations
on my cheek. I wanted to part
the iris spears, climb inside
the flowers’ folds between
their amber beards
and purple skin.
On my sock-faced steed,
broom handle between my legs
I’d lunge across the stone wall
from garden to cow yard, gallop
past the henhouse full of murmuring
rusty forms, arrested
by the regiment of geese. Above
a spotless back, whiter than rime,
the gander lorded it, his serpentine
neck lofting a fiery beak,
his hissing tongue a yellow blade
I feared and could not leave alone.
We’d embrace, his feathers like skin
against my cheek, before he toppled me.
Always rescued from this falling,
I always lapsed.
One Sunday after church he returned transfigured,
crackling brown on a milky ironstone platter.
I was learning we become desires,
desires become us.
After the blessing, outside turned in
and inside out: I felt his orange beak,
his flesh turn in my gut,
as I became myself.
