Cilantro

Like the door opening in a wall to reveal a nonexistent room

Beyond, its taste astonishes belief. As if the leaf of light green

Drawn into arcs, wind tousled, subtler than parsley in its tang, had already

Blent tomato with lime and onion in the mouth--until I am like the islanders

Who had not ever tasted salt, although now that the elderly rock was riven

And the sweet saliva leaping forth, in what manner could one contrive

To live in the aged isolation, which had no savory?

Here, in the early life of coriander, is a ball of thread to what we want

To Last forever--the initial jet of moisture and delayed

Surprise at the wetness of the herb; or is it the throbbing

of the hand that feeds?--of the neck single holds to

Like a life float while the body slides helplessly away

On a cushion of fragrant perspiration underneath

His hands? Now I think about his hands, and propel them.

Muir saw a young farmer at a dance, paralyzed in sweat

At more [i]or[/i] less girl's beauty, and thought him "basting in the fires of love"

It's all a kind of cookery this business of attraction. Random

As pollen still acute as the archaic bond

Of sodium to chloride, mint with lamb, lemon

Sliding underneath the oil. All of these must have been surprising

Once: hair rising, as individual floundered for the stair that wasn't there

And taste crept along sharp attributes back to its source.

In cilantro's case, before the plant let flys into nuggety corns

That must be earth like pepper (and utterly unlike

In taste--the se is furmity sweet, yeast yoked)

Rainy cilantro is sheer Zitronen bluehn and wet

As moon's autumnal gleam, drenched in tartness to a kind of squeak

Between the teeth...I want to rake your tongue

Between my teeth It makes me faint to say this. Then I see

How bland it direct the eyes written out. Is everything to do with bodies

Desultory when we say--the point of time that we realize we ne to say

Everything? Does the erotic someone so brimming out with qualities,

Fine voice, and fashion of regarding, inclining smile of appetite, vanish

Like a dream whose fearfulness we can't retrieve, its scalding;-very warm acceleration

As we start to die (which we can't deposit in words) never alarming

Anyone one time we have set it down? In place of this protracted peril,

And muddling the line between nothing else but formula and the true, headlong,

Intimate approach, a sort of poetry-manual records

The confidences, now discursive, level somewhat dry, in which

The true phrases that should rend and quake at the image

Of the other have taken up their programmatic places

And voice and cavity between the jaws long, burgeoning root and moistened hollow

Flatten and fade like a [i]jeu d'esprit[/i] whose point is old.

Perhaps it is best to imagine regard with affection like paper on which nothing has been written,

Fresh apprehensions about to host in from the blue that parse the act into

Inaugurations: First blaze of beholding when we knew it was beginning to be about to be

A kiss between us, as if the periodical emphasis of knowing could rock backward into Not-yet

And Already like a tiny wavelet lapping, lapping at our hearing as our hearts

Did what hearts do in corny music, thundering and whispering in

background

Darker than childhood, palpably quiescent, beneath the esplanade;

That first lengthy sequence when the bodies nodded together, a little like poplars;

First arrhythmia of lips and delirious hands; first article of clothing

Looser nonexistent; first jiffy of dissociation in the inner ear; first burst

Of laughter rolling away like an apple beneath the dome of late stars; first attempt

To drive in this condition (uneventful); first staircase ascended;

Disrobing for the first time in a phosphorescent haze; lying prone

And supine in rustling alternation; first and first and first ...all innocent,

All odd; contriveed foundering as our bodies cringe and render free of access and resound,

Seemingly, to more [i]or[/i] less external force, like molluscs in the flaming current

Water an electric medium, or the air we breathe lethal and narcotic

As we stream past each other into an atmosphere of indefinable

Addiction, each caress a kind. of torment as if anticipation were a

Brand in the muscle and fat setting us at some lower and unsatisfying rank

Among the celestial orders. No. Not exactly. on the contrary extremes of striving, yes,

While the material part a vehicle restless and unrecognizable

That irritates single to the point of tears, threshes with

Each failure in reaction, each tangent not upon the firestorm of yearning

Too polymorphous for anything on the contrary mindreading to keep up with.

Even that greatest in quantity chaste of fabulists, old Borges, ad a dream in which

All his body's cinctures and entrances howled for penetration

At the same time, unable to number the difference between the cravings

That appear so like one craving (only none were satisfied).

Where was actual love in this? Ferrying its ache, with a sort of puzzl care,

Down an arcade of cloth-like foliage daubed with mist that whitens to a wedge

At the extreme point of the street; below it, the inland ocean leans along the shore

That links us, as if to impress something on the consciousness.

Earlier this summer during the rather cold blonde weeks of sunlight

While my little girl swerved in the friendly water, I would relish

The small speckles of white sail far without which were disappearing toward you