Medlar or Michigan banana, too many names and too many ghosts

Here we go again, she said, she said, that goldfinch, with her spring speckle, with the downy confusion, the panic and the heat, the world turning all on a thistle seed.

What could you say about that? You know which that, that that. The marble, the blood, and the long, long, leafing through fine soled shoes, the thick heels and the bell, it’s all about the bell, denim-wrapped, the perfect curve, god’s own smiling bow, the crest and the swell, swinging dipping, belling--sound me, sound me deep all I know anymore is that thin space between the bell and the strike, if only that were all there were. If only lifetimes were fifteen seconds, I’d love to live again and again. In that space between her hip and the faint air dimple of her passing, yellow threads stitching fire, rivets, the tug, double up and kiss, that’s all it is, all it is, it is. But isn’t that something?

I suddenly realized, and not long ago, that it is all about the pupil. God has been knocking at my pupil’s door, as it were. Of course, it has always been about the scent, nothing can change that. It has always been in the nose, the space where I exist, but that one eye I saw, that sweet face of god, that one eye of aquamarine tissue, blown tissue, fissures and fjords and seeping black, the fuzzy uncertain iris in that otherwise implacable stare, that pupil said to me, one Thursday, it was Thursday, and parted brown hairs warm air rising, in that rising column, the elegant, sacred, furry space, in that warm bowl of becoming, that ocean, that slippery otter flashing across my mind, right there, there was this thing, this blown pupil, this bending of blackness that made me pause, just for a second, and remember all the rest. There was that, and there was freckle.

I don’t mind a woman. I don’t mind to see a woman stretched out, a bright wire, a thin tight line between the ground and the sky, the hard edge, and her nipples spitting fire at the moon, no I don’t mind that so much. I don’t mind the custard bowl, the risen loaf, that Michigan banana of cresting sweetness, the bowl and the bell, the rhubarb and cream skin, the rosy cleft, soft down and cotton memoirs, the sticky and the sweet.

I know, time is a problem for me. I have a problem with time. Just this minute, when I was picking almond skin from my teeth, there was a question as to whether I was up north, whether it was a field trip and we were all pretty young, the women with the taut, high-pitched areolas, bright and shrill. We were pretty young, young and full of shit, shitting full-barreled medlars, not the same as the loquat, loquat. Were we up north for god's sake or were we out west, in Fresno? The answer was obvious but somehow it all is smelling the same.

Loquat! It’s a cry, a scream, a world brought low, torn wide open. How dare you live without the loquat? Of course, here, I have no choice. I’ve left behind all that behind. The loquats and the fig. The persimmon and the pomegranate.

No, you have no idea how sick I am of these ghosts. Ghosts, like snot clinging to everything. The toothbrush covered with webbing, the forgotten grocery lists of dead people, the guilt and the pee-soaked shame. I am tired of these lists. Of course, I wouldn’t be very happy to be covered with fleas either, so there is that. At least I am not currently covered by fleas. See, you have to keep these things in perspective.