I. The tumble
you were pestered out of me.
rose bramble, thorns and pink horns
I had saved from the grotto by the mangrove
where the intertidal prawns
waited for you,
have simplified into a monastery.
I was never the prototype, so bare
and sick from your popehood,
my clumps, still fecund,
still fecund in your spittle-wisps
that continue to tempt me.
and the trinkets from the cave
that were dipped into dragons and my smoke
sit on a mantelpiece
somewhere in your insect-infectious homes,
while the monastery stands,
and the jaggedness of our peace reopens.
II. Red star
we placed a rivulet on ourselves,
a red star and a template
for gurgling and for fears
that we will never be complete,
even though you were already
de-scaling the fish.
you left for our river-tank,
the thing that fries and pops,
as the red star drizzles ointments
and morphed fire
on this stubborn pitch.
III. Wildlife
You have managed it—
the landscape of this time,
a wasp in the crown of a canopy,
a ladle in the pulp, jungle-juice.
At this hour, your eyes, like botfly eggs
invade the chick,
who wills itself into shape-shifting,
to stroke your will,
the very botfly
that interrupts the oropendola,
my youth.
Still, you managed—
the symbiosis, the holistic pain
that subsists like cysts in a mole,
in the jungle’s person,
the man of mammals and all,
the earth opens,
you surface from a skull, a few moths,
a stream of toucans.
IV. Climate
I call when the weather is
firmly chained to your ripened lung,
phlegm and love,
offshoots of civility,
our joint envy
of a hurricane over the seas.
You begin to dream as the lung unearths
tumeric, clove and fenugreek,
my ancestral guilts boiled to resonate
in the billion more monsoons,
maybe a tornado,
happening as they do,
in mirrors and porcelain and blood.
V. Secrets
Both concealed,
forebreaths careful not to touch,
the synthesis.
Gloworms, mint and this,
deepened love of the understorey,
a fort,
where woodlice patrol
the elemental streets
to unfasten entangled
plants, those deciduous freshlings
you once proclaimed to be
the be-all and end-all of this.
And maybe that moon,
private in the fields,
will drop to the thistle,
where our feet ripped,
and mallow grew from the wounds,
to work like the woodlice,
to study our pores that are filled with silence,
one bombed pod at a time,
revealing this anatomy.