Scott Beal
What is this green shaft we rise in
like the asparagus miner birthed into a stalk
of breathing jade who bores deep
into pith designed to nourish it, as we
dug into those spears I roasted in oil and pepper
we licked from our fingers, I'm asking,
isn't this luck voluptuous enough to share
with juniper webworms, can't we invite them
to spin silken tubes around us as we all feed together
from these gravied plates, and isn't what happens
to them what happens each night to another drop of my blood,
doesn't it rise into a coin of fluttering copper—
and bring the strawberry tortrix, the beet armyworm,
have you heard how the greedy scale fixes
the exact spot it wants on the skin of its fruit
then spreads its joy in a purple radius around it,
aren't you tempted to hold so fast to sweetness it leaves
a bruise, haven't I heard you praise a bruise
on your thigh when we couldn't rein our hips
from demanding with all their might, and yes,
the female lone star tick has a tattooed back
and gets aggressive as the Texas it's named for,
where rough men butcher beef that one nip from this tick,
I mean it, can make them allergic to—imagine a kiss
with the power to hobble every wrangler salivating
over his kill, and let's say I'm joking, let's mean
them no harm, but help me imagine the kiss—and bring
the alderflies with dark delicate wings gabled over their backs
and scorpionflies whose stingers do not sting but are
a mistaken way of seeing their ungainly penises,
and don't forget the growers whose fondest wish
for all tiny creeps is to scorch them off the earth,
and remember the haters of variation
who'd gaily beat us in our bed if they could read
the relishes scrolled behind our eyes, and how
we need them, spiny bollworm and paper wasp,
archdeacon and agribiz tycoon without whose chemistry
we might never savor asparagus again
or the fat Betelgeuse burst of a strawberry
cracking its shell of milk chocolate
after I've dipped it and set it on a saucer
to cool, on a day we both trudge home
across a forest asphalted over, clearing space
like two ambrosia beetles, small citizens
who meet far into the heartwood
of a fallen tree, through galleries they've excavated
and cultivated with fungal gardens, I'm asking,
can this be always how we come face to face,
our labors and our sustenance blooming
as far as we both can see.