Venus's-Flytraps

She's at the mouth of a river
singing tongueless mantras
among reeds. A green parrot
picks up a birth cry
from cattails & broken grass.
No word yet for flesh.
If the gods have mouths now,
they say raven, raven.
Darkness wound in camphor
trees, the first smile
unconscious as a mooncalf's
under the sky's white belly--
the first anything.
She winds the blood's clock.

Happy?
Who knows.
The tree gods
test a flowering branch over the river:
Sway-jig, sway-jig, sway-jig.
They ease out to its white verge--
half in this world, half in another,
ugly & beautiful. Caressing sky,
he reaches for a black-
orange butterfly on her head.
They linger there, caught up
in the slow blue song.
Then they invent a game
called Push & Shove.

Yusef Komunyakaa is the author of twelve books of poems, including Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000); Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1994), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Dien Cai Dau (1988), which won The Dark Room Poetry Prize; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; and Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999. A decorated Vietnam veteran, Komunyakaa recently received the 2001 Ruth Lilly Prize. He serves as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and is currently a professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

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