Season for Osmanthus

At home this very minute
the sweet olive is flowering,
turning the air heavy and heady (how
did you get so sticky with want?)

Stay outside too long and you
get drunk on it, go zigzagging
through the neighbors' yard and avow

you will sleep in the grass
because you want to keep smelling that smell
until the small apocalypse of the dawn

Approach the sweet olive tree directly
and you can't smell a damn thing
because redolence is a gift
(so sidle, breathe, wait)

Meanwhile you expand,
hippy as a rosebud and just as knockout
I could spend days in awe

of your melliferous mouth
as we wait for the breeze to bring us sweet olive
(a secret
that flies to the corners
of your mouth and turns them
slowly
upward)

Sufjan Interjects Again

What makes a belly good is not its girth
—sneezing the sneeze of short snouts—
Or its ability to be disguised by an empire waist
—snorfling into my armpit—
But whether you can lay with it exposed
—careening through patches of tall grass —
Inviting adoration or showing submission
—nearly rolling off the bed or stairs—
And either way trusting the flesh to be exactly enough
—closing alien-large eyes to better feel
the relief of short nails on furry, imperfect skin.

Mercy of the Clarinetist, Libations to the Glass

Lauren was patient as a fern.
She did not even laugh when I said the sadness felt like a cylinder of frozen peas,
But made me sit with the thing so plain I couldn't make a metaphor of it.

That's what was left after I hurled glass bottles into a concrete wall,
Hoping the itch would leave my golgothan hands.
Some of it did, but glass shards lurked in the weeds
And I could not gather them all.
It's the kind of cold that burns, I said. Not the comfortable cool
Every Louisiania-born fat woman longs for from March to October.

What clenches in my abdomen, what leaves long red marks
On my face when I wake in the morning
Is the loneliness of the small, round, hard things you microwave
When there is no one else to cook for.