Vulgar Remedies: Poems

Sonnets to the Egyptian Chamomile Farmers

71 Sonnets to the Egyptian Chamomile Farmers 1 My box of herbal tea promises sleep, human rights: a fair trade. It promises its third-world farmers are safe, paid a good wage. The sunburnt men tend those apple-scented herbs so I might finally sleep. Right now, I’m heavy as blue fields of flowering chamomile. Right now, I hold the whole dusky outskirts of Cairo in my mouth. Without honey. Not a drop. I waft the boiled, grassy taste. I want my tongue to remember how to rest. Instead it ticks, begins to whisper: Habibi, my sweetheart, my beloved, my dear. In my ear, an Egyptian lullaby: Bee Queen, Bee Queen, your keepers are sleeping through time. 72 2 Would it surprise you to find a white goat behind each of my teeth? Those blocks like limestone about to drop. The goats crushed during construction. Would it surprise you if a pyramid’s rising, right now, on the back of my tongue, under the red loop of my uvula that swings like a sun on a hook? I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t dreamed in corpses’ bouquets, the sweet acacia snuffing its lights, the scent of a garland in the architecture: woven mint, wild celery, dill. They make pills for that, sweetheart. They make tea from flowers so ghostly they seed on my tongue. 73 3 Farmer, your fingertips run blue. I knew this, since I woke with your whorled thumbprints slung low on my neck—from when you checked my pulse—slowed to the beat of the dreamworld: to Almost-Ghost: to the white oak’s hole-filled leaves that drop in slow time. You know, there’s a country in which broken clocks are outlawed. Here, we’re all outlaws. Like in the dream where I can’t see the numbers on my watch and people’s lips stub out words with a blur, as in an overdub. Once, in my driving dream, the wheel wouldn’t stop spinning, so I tore circles through a forest. An impossible path. Mornings, I peel my bed sheets from your shape, find a pile of raked leaves, and they scatter. ...