Amygdalus
persica
(Peach )
For
you, sweet thing, only the orchard's great
voluptuary, sugar as a heat
mirage, the August sun dripping
over the lip of the world,
brazen, annealed.
For
you, love, nothing but the incarnation
of hedonistic languor, sun-hot flesh
so ripe it barely holds itself together,
a radiant acidity arrayed
around a corrugated shell
enclosing
something like an almond. What
can I tell you, darling? Nothing changes. Break
its skin and you will always have the same
swift hit to the amygdala:
each molecule of scent is,
for
you, my own, a recapitulation
of an original experience
that grows association like a root
time only deepens. And was anything
ever more glorious than this
expression
of long-term potentiation,
of something that comes back and back and each
time bigger, more potent, all the gaudy rush
of nectar down your throat, the honeyed light
and all of it only
for
you, sweetheart, and for no other
reason than to show how pleasure
too can concentrate with time?
There is the blonde down
on her forearm, there
is
the drunken, swooning heat
that grew between your voices every time
you thought about the last time, or the next.
There is the way that every word
branched and seemed to set
its
own fruit, an abundance that could break
itself. It's all exquisitely
preserved, the way that staggering
lushness consumed you even as it was
consumed. The peach tree has a message
for
you, dear, and it's this: your memories,
your gut reactions, your addictions, your
conditioned fears and pleasures, the ability
to be transported by a hint
of perfume: these things are
forever,
love, they are immortal even
if you are not. How elegant design
is, that it does this: you're reduced
to nothing, finally, but all the work
it took to bring you there
stays
put. And there's a thing
deep in the limbic brain that says
so, wordlessly collating what you feel
so you can learn from it, and it is shaped
just like the kernel of the peach.
For
you, then, love: the fruit
Of complicated generosities,
Of things perfected by anticipation,
By recollection. Fruit of infinite
Seduction, fruit of liquid
Flame,
fruit of the velvet
Glove and the suckerpunch.
Fruit of oh God, oh yes, of pheromones,
Of heat, of incipient bruises, of overdoing it,
Of being unable to even want to stop.
Brugmansia
suaveolens
(Angel's Trumpet)
Liftoff.
Oh and the open mouths of horns
Exude libidinous
Motifs, a wafting air you're sure you've heard
Somewhere before. You're borne
Vertiginously upward, outward. This
Is where it all gets hard
To
fathom, but to rise above it all,
It's certain one must be
Extremely high. The air thins, and your eyes
Are dinnerplates, and ease
Gives way to ecstasy, and then to awe,
A holy shock. And by
The
time you understand what you are seeing,
It's something else already.
Between your fingers there's a cigarette
Burning. But when you get
It to your lips, it vanishes in heady
Smoke wisps. Then comes back. Being
Apart
from everything might almost bring
On a transcendent sense
Of oneness. Only there's a woman watching
You. Saying not a thing.
Impassive, mask-faced, almost in a trance
But for the way she's crouching
Like
something set to spring, and she refuses
To answer when you ask
Her what she wants. You try to focus on
The landscape. But the brass
Section crescendos once again, a drawn-
Out caterwaul that uses
At
once the sweetest, most angelic airs
Ever recorded, and
Riffs so risqué a carnival marching band
Would blush en masse. And there's
A message in it. All
Is heightened, archetypal. Read the scrawl
That's
spreading out beneath you. Oh, it's all
Right there. Subaudible,
Beneath the squalling trumpets and the growing
Sense that your mouth is full
Of sand, lies what you're seeking, and you're going
To get it. And to fall
From
this height… well. We all know divination's
A solo flight. The lights
Flash, waver. Starry maps. Sudden insights,
Each synapse acrobat
To acrophobia's ledge - yes, all of that,
And none, too. Syncopation.
It's
deadly hot. Your lungs sear on the air.
You're thrashing, a drowned fish.
Fixed eyelids. You want out. What did you think
You sought here? Try to blink.
Nothing. Swallow: impasse. And as you wish
For help, with debonair
Big-band
abandon all the trumpets scream
Their wicked a piacere
And there's a crazy kiss-of-death nocturne
Of a perfume, too, torn
Right from the headlines of a dirty dream.
It's challenging the very
Definition
of divine. And how
Is it you only now
Think to ask yourself which angel plays
A trumpet? Tropane daze
Aside, the swelling embouchure, the pitching
World here at the witching
Hour,
says this, and only this: Entia sunt
Multiplicanda praeter
Necessitatem. And, my dear, you'd better
Believe it: infinite
Division makes sense where the great witch-hunt
For elegance cannot.
Things
make connections, scatter, rebound, crack
And close, ripen and split.
Not so much divination as divine
Accident captures it.
And we are tongue-tied after we get back
From seeing it. It's fine:
There's
music to it. Brassy. Full of wit
And lust and otherness.
It might originate within you, just
Like the narcotic breath
Of night-sweet flowers, leaking as they must
A drug for moths. And what
You
know, if you know anything: the sky
Will let go. No volition;
Just a profuse eroticism kissed
With terror. Hey: well, this
Is flying ointment, honey. There's a fly
In it by definition
©
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