September: Poems

Maybe Gravity

45 Maybe Gravity is a metaphor for desire: her attraction to the apple and the star-seeded earth inside it, the man picking the fruit, dropping it beside a hollow ball of twine and watching the way bodies of different weight will even in air and land at the same time, as something in me is falling now, knowing this descent is cumulative and has already been parceled into an equation elegant as the blossom that mothers the fruit. There will always be more to see, I thought once, staring into a grapefruit. Everything missing will become something new. Now I clop one open into two sunny bowls, saw my knife along the rim, tip it in and in 46 to the knot in the middle, wedge a pink parcel onto my spoon as juice and lashes of pulp flood the gaps, splash me almost in the eye— Yoo-hoo, why so far away? my mother would call from the counter, years before I understood the measure of her attention, her vigilance in dividing fruit from rind. Now I shovel up mangled bits, scrape the skin to a socket, tear the pulp to raw rubbled mouth, flaps and labia, lips of skin. When isn’t fruit a woman’s body? Years before the hot drop of menopause, my mother held an apple in her elegant hand, and in one uninterrupted turning, stripped it of its sprung red ribbon. We set it on the radiator to dry, added a tiny kerchief and cloves for eyes, and it was amazing, how soon, how human its wrinkled face, as if the doll were nothing we had made but what had been there waiting. ...