Poetry
Motive
Collin Bunting
Believe it listens from other rooms
in form like a womb at the edges
of windows, of water,
batters itself against an image
as flies do,
green and see-through and hungry.
Believe it tries
shamelessly in dark hours,
watches its body like a thief,
keeps records of what is missing
in lockclick,
in tiptoe;
it has feet of baby blankets.
Believe in morning's pink striations,
morning's little box, from which all
treasure hunts descend.
Believe it will smile a tank of black.
Believe it is a hollow throat,
waiting to pull a voice into itself,
a web fashioned from tinsel triangles.
you me it.
you me it.
In blind sunlight it performs
like a Catherine in the garden of eden.
It says
I am.
I am.
Picture ripe summer,
a uterus like a nectarine.
It needs
sentences chewed at the ends like soft explosions.
In the afternoon
it brushes the grasses from your back,
tells you everything you ever need
is
entangled,
green,
leaving.
Believe it reinvents itself
over and over and over,
the voice, your voice,
pinked and smooth and spinning.
You'll know what it intends is pure—
the everyday words, the swollen dots,
the unrecognizable ink blots.
Imagine what this is.
The insecurity in a face.
Telling a story.
Hoping for laughter.
It is a gentle fruit that hatches.
It is ice and fire.
It is both beautiful and the destroyer of ages.
It smells of
Yellow.
Fields.
Orchards of mourning.
Glory.
Picture dinners of fork orchestras,
the solidarity, the conversations
burning. Shameless,
it listens from a core of brown and rot.
(who I am.)
(who I am not.)
Poetry comes from this.
The fly from the fruit.