The Garden of Longing

The garden is a spinning clock.
And clocks have always noted
loss. The poppies, risen like suns
from some underworld of hate
have fallen back by now and grapes
adorn the trellises like stars

of blood upon the surfaces of muscle,
swelling. And soon they will
be consumed. Spit out into a darkened
bowl and washed into the bowels
of earth, a river gathering up the stones
into its mouth and mumbling them out
onto the violent bottom of the sea.

While somewhere a violin is playing
a picture of your face, the high
cheekbones rising like mist off of the bow,
a morning gathering in your lips
like dew holding down the sun
on every blade of grass or trembled

note, or bells in dry hot noon plazas
in some murderous, desert south, the peppers
grown like fire into their tortured shapes
and hung already upon the house like the hides
of slaughtered animals, dripping red
into the yellow day, as a woman

crawls from the doorway bleeding,
not speaking, not moaning, or weeping,
even beneath the thick feet of bells
treading through the air, over her rusted
vines and ruined garden, her love
far away and inside something

beating her, erupting within her
at noon, black flowers that grip
the last of the dirt hurt her
beneath her aching breasts.