(no subject)

[penguinboy.livejournal.com]

Hortus Conclusus

What kind of wilderness
takes bread and milk
from a blue willow saucer?
A wilderness that trains you
to a feverish faith.
You feed it ceaselessly,
you’ve fallen
under a type of persuasion
a child’s book might call a spell:
how invisible the walls are
closing in.
Now say it’s nothing
but another’s body–approximate
to your own, but foreign.
The body must accompany you
everywhere you go. Now tell it something:
it doesn’t listen. It hasn’t the restraint
to live inside that cultivated space
speech makes. Feed it
from your finger,
a waterdrop with salt dissolved.
This provision is intimate, fiduciary.
Language is intent on entering
its hidden garden.
You ask this hunger for a name.
It sends you looking for one
tumbling on the ground, across the night-
grass into bushes.

by Miranda Field