Dirt-eaters(02?)

1.

They did the living room in Ralph Lauren Suede, spread
unevenly across the walls to look like terra cotta. They found
new cabinets, and scattered the living-room with toys. The daughter
tossed her dolls around the room, heaped beneath the fireplace
like carcasses. There there (she’d say): it’s not a human child.
With blue translucent eyes all-too-human, the Siamese mix
watches for the little girl’s whims with the silver spoon
in her mouth. Maybe when she grows she’ll build a house
of scorched earth for her parents, just as they conceived
these ochre walls of blood from which she could emerge.

2.

What would the color of tubers be if you were blind?
What would they taste like in the place in which they root,
their fibers probes? To which sense would their colors appeal?

To see them in their element, what kind of eyes are required?
But above the ground, if you could see, not taste them?
Many different carrots, many shapes of carrot, not the carrot.

In the farmer’s field or produce section, you see parsnips
and even if the soil in which they grew cakes up your fingers
or is rough to your palate as you rub a clod of dirt upon it

you are as close to parsnips or to roots as you are to stars
expiring as soon as you try to catch them above you.


3.

You hope the dirt you stoop to eat will grow inside you
with mirrored facets going to your eyes and the hardness of flint
to your bones, you hope the life expressed in the sheen
of the kernel of corn or the fatness of leaf will flow directly
to your organs, you want the things that breathe in dirt
to breathe through your pores, you want the life of dirt
to expire through them, as if your actual skin could leaf.

What else do you hope for when you clutch dirt in your hands,
and swallow it after the harvest, the corn cut from the stubble?
What seems constantly underfoot is constantly in motion–
bacterium, seedling, ground-up rock, these little mica mirrors.
All that is solid melts into air or dissolves before scrutiny.


4.

Newspapers, dry as blades of corn, the old news brought
to woodsheds, or shredded by the field-mice for bedding,
the dry sheets rattling like snakes entwined in skeletons

in other dry fields. Dirt has little to do with what’s above.
But with a powerful microscope, the news appears in dirt.
A spoon of dirt takes more than a year’s worth of paper

to report – how do you condense the overturning of dirt
in paragraphs as squat and dynamic as this one?
When I examine dirt beneath a lens, I think how things

are out of scale, and how much time it must take
to recover the scale, so that I see the dirt as more
than under my heel, than what is packed between the treads

so that I know as much about the dirt as about words
bled away or blotted by watermarks or blanched by sun
from the paper. More likely than not, these lines

will share the paper’s fate: the punditry imprinted
on paper already matter less than dirt beneath their feet
or in their eye: may they, with the paper, rest in peace.

5.

For Anthony, a sign of strength to drink the gilded puddle,
pooled in the bulkhead after rains, the soiled leaves
floating without lobes or autumnal blush, the groundwater
wetting the window frames, chunks of masonry
tumbling into the hole from which they came --
pocked concrete meteors, simple intifada projectiles --
what doesn’t seek the level, least challenging altitude?
And where does gravity begin except with soil,
its magnetism and ponderous weight sexy, engendering?

A serial killer thinks he is a god whose seed will bring
the dead to life, although the victim doesn’t rise
from a shallow grave bedecked with worms and shoots
like the winding of hair upon a Botticellian Venus,
doesn’t quite confirm how blood fattens the fields
in the summertime of the world. An ochre stain,
a foot of clay upon the statue, says we’re alive.