Prima Materia

My prima materia is uterine rock,
castoff mineral, tissue moons.

Buzz Aldrin’s first words when
he stepped on the moon
were words we don’t often hear:
Magnificent desolation!

I wonder, if I dive into those words,
will you accuse me of being uncaring?

In London there was a little park
I passed through twice every day.
It was studded with deep green
gravestones, and pillowed with quiet.

It held me for a little while. In the morning

I entered through a far-flung
wrought iron gate. In the afternoon
I slid by discordant concrete, the back
wall of a shabby pub’s private room.

In the middle there was simply someone
else’s past, and sky between the trees.

I’m not a mountain to climb on, I tell
my children now. But why? I offer
them landscapes: fleshy mound of belly,
shoulder peaks, inexplicable calloused heels.

My daughter dreams a sinister woman
who smokes a pipe of willow wood. She
runs away. She’s still too young to know
how to pass through, or even stay.

I dream a black snake slithers off an altar
and I swallow her. She coils in my womb,

at home, poised to proclaim with forked tongue
the moonscape beauty, the sheer
uselessness of what surrounds her.