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.