Palabras (for La Diosa)

Here it is almost ready to rain

It is as if the weather would begin
a long sentence

but keeps stalling over the first few words -

a drop here, three drops, a little wind

Then, a moment later, the manic stutter of cicadas
who are desperate to explain their thing for trees

but somehow stick on that one odd syllable.
It is this way at times.

A man keeps tapping the tip of his nose,
his brain tensed like a spider,
but what's the use? All sense runs away.

It's as if every word were a roach
and the need to speak
like turning on the kitchen light.

Let's say, for example, that I love you
and must tell you why.

Your eyes... see what I mean?

The taste of your mouth...

Do you see how I sweat?

Your fingers. The fields.
The fine, fine weave of your skin.
I want to say so much about so much.

It's as if my heart were crammed with grapes -

each of which I would slip inside you,
then savor lazily, lying under a willow
while the long shade wrapped its legs around me.

Of course I talk like this now - my heart
is swollen with grapes,

grapes I would steer carefully with my lips
up and over the Aztec-brown swerves de tus nalgas

grapes I would squeeze then sip
from the tiny chalice of your navel
while God held both of us in Her all-knowing mouth.

Now everyone wants to question my appropriateness.
I can even feel my parents, faraway, squinting
and crossing their arms.

But how can I not say that I'm saying?
Because of you and your witch's talk, woman

my heart is a grape - big as a man -
a grape full of gasoline, a grape so thoroughly grown

it would be a zeppelin
if it didn't walk around all day
writing its hands -

a grape that wears glasses, a grape
that breaks chairs, a grape that mumbles
with its mouth full of chips,
a frape so well hidden in itself
that it has disappeared entirely.

and then come these words

all at once, as if from nowhere

like a storm.

-Tim Seibels, from Hammerlock (1999)