You will never be the bread
you will never be the knife
and there is no way, no how, that you could ever be the wine.Â
And I want to get things straight. Just so you know,
I will never be the sound of rain on the roof
or the moon in the trees.
I will never be any kind of nuts laid out on your table.
I hope Billy Collins never conjures me in two-dimensional metaphors for you.
In my dreams, I would have you breathe me out of the pages
of Neruda or Marquez or saucy Sor Juana.
Softer, heavier, stickier words that make your hair frizzy just from listening.
I want to grow inside of orange tree verses,
to sweat magical realism you could swim through,
and I want to recorrer through your mind like retruĂ©canosÂ
that twist around on themselves to make truth out of contradictions.
Neruda was terrified by the sea,
but his Chilean cottage on the rocks inspired pages out of him that we still repeat.
Maybe that is the beginning of true poetry:
living every day with the beating of volatile fear on your doorstep,
looking out into the fray, and seeing beauty.
I want to become grey-sea-spray terrible and lovely someday.
My love, if you must think of me metaphorically,
I would have you read my living form intoÂ
Little flowers with sharp shells growing hearts right out of the earth--
not even Pablo's poetry could do them justice.
when alcachofas dance through the corneas of your mind,
I want you to think of me, young, and green, and hardened on the outside,
only you will know the feeling of my soft underbelly
or the vulnerability of the skin just below my breasts.
I am not a vegetable preparing for battle.
Neruda must have never seen artichokes growing in the wild.
There they bloom in blues and purples that cover their hearts in bruised colors
more vibrant than the human body could ever be.
They sigh open the pain of having a soft heart in the too-light language of feathery petals,
quickly folding themselves over until they are protected,
and only those who are in the know and motivated
will patiently pry open every shell-like petal,Â
sucking the softness off,
savoring the sweetness of a promised heart in pieces.
This is the best sacrifice.
At our feast of fibrous greens,
we will sit at the dinner table, two aztec priests,
holding the hearts of our victims in our hands,
the gold our empire was destroyed for,
dripping from our fingers
in rivulets of heated fat.
We will lick everything up.
Desperate for rain and the knowledge
that we will live to love another day.
So. When you think of artichokes, my lover,
I want you to crave me--and bowls full of butter.
Because dipping fingers into liquid gold,
slurping up heart offerings for gods long forgotten,
is the heresy and the beauty
that Neruda missed in his portrayal of the only vegetable you can both bite into and kiss.
He must never have used the soft section of heart
to paint golden gluttonous pleasure on his lover’s laughing face.
I can only hope Sor Juana saw something to be admired in the beautiful prickly plants,
that GarcĂa Márquez recognized the metaphor in their soft-hearted misanthropy.
I hope you are never moved to write a litany
to all my household souls.
I have no intention of becoming the moon in the trees,
nor the sound of rain on the roof.
You and I are far too human andÂ
much less far-fetched to pretend to be all that.
We are just two pairs of lips,