Juli KROLL

FORTUNATA AND HYACINTH

I.

I have been fortunate
to know men's bodies intimately
To touch a peeled orange with a tongue

In the day there is heartrace and stargrace
In the night there are palms wet like fire.

I have been fortunate to know men's bodies
To cradle hips white oleander

My arms lopped off with frozen scissors.

I have been herded all at once into kennels
of shaven sheep that groaned in wind

While the ones that stayed behind
were enviously old,

My mother's eyes become
plump black plums.

 

II.

I have never fucked a mother
or a sister
But brother let me tell you
how to scat.

We are all born buried
waiters
upside down in an ocean of hemp.

In a manger's clay
we bury grief hatchets
to help you win a steeplechase of grace.

I have never fucked a mother or a sister,
But I have fucked, a sister and a mother.

Broad reflection no refraction
I have covered you fast as scissor legs

Loved how light held your melon hips
My lemon pubis shredded your glass eye.

Leafy sprouts were the fastest gifts I gave you
Until nature let me bleed a different color.

 

III.

A thespian, I have watched
your three comets

crater Venutian shores

I swallow I swallow your feathers
O why can't my hand get around you?

My throat blankets your trachea
Roves nipples' bleak sable patina

I love your white house
of belly

Because it boarded me,
mindful of no one else.

This, my turtle shell
are your ribs

Albino cradle
hollowed out
like a murdered bird.

 

IV.

A whinnying sigh
Everywhere following,
I am always swallowing
arid landscapes inside.

Sullen, I desert you
Rise and shallow dive
To mount your tips
A hummingbird landing in absinthe.

Lest your body inter me I build
my sick home on higher ground
In a mound of oysters and horsehair
are my cockleshells and bells on lookout always

But your beacon rounds me out
Routs bones, gently crackling
toes, nose, hips,
even though I don't have a sister.

You could loan me one of your three
- One slowly knitting
setting her apples in a toolshed
- One unsettling, climbing Everest
- The other milking August for millificent
hayseed, dandelions and suckling pigs.

Over the course of our two landslides
I ask you to grow
a lake of sulphuric innocence
to know the magnificence of women

I have come to know
men's bodies,
purpling like the others
that drown by the wayside

A pomegranate, a sonnet,
a senator, a planet:
I know your body infinitely
like a wound winding around Golgotha.

Copyright © Juli A.Kroll, 2002.  All Rights Reserved.

TABLE OF CONTENTS    NEXT PAGE