Orange tree

 

Fotografia de Annie Spratt

A ginkgo leaf like a splayed ass

A begonia leaf is a pebbled surface 

          green and burgundy

A long and narrow leaf curls down

All the different methods 

          of extending yourself so the sun 

          might better touch you

Serrated edges of the teardrop 

          nettle leaves

sting your fingers

The nursery labels everything 

          and so assigns appearances 

          to names I only know from fiction

Old novels set in houses with gardens 

          where the lovers meet 

          or someone paces, thinking

Jonquil and clematis

Omniscient narrator 

          conceived by a dead person

From the limb of a sapling in a silver tub 

          the photo of a future flower 

          dangles by a plastic noose

Years ago, you biked home 

          with a leaf tucked under your helmet 

          and taped it by its stem up on the door

 

I try to force my soul up to the surface of my skin

I try to send my mind into my mouth, into my hand 

          to touch you with

I repeat

in my head the sentences 

          I love you I love you more than anyone 

          ever can and suck your cock repeating them

 

You stood in the bathroom 

          testing faces in the mirror 

          while I lay in the next room 

          pretending to read

You could make soap balance on a round ledge

The ragged flesh along your thumbs 

          where you bite the skin off 

          watching television

Stop, it hurts me when you do that

How can it hurt you

 

On your knees, preparing surfaces

stapling canvas over stretchers 

          laying ground over the canvas

You pour paint on wet gesso so the stain 

          spreads slowly on its own 

          and we can go get coffee

Trying to get down under the immortal dailiness 

          and touch the myth beneath the fiction

 

We stayed one night 

          with a couple I knew

At dinner, the wife ate rice with us 

          and the husband ate what looked like rice 

          but was in fact minced cauliflower

She set the bed up in the living room

We’d go before they woke

We fucked very quietly in the gray light

Your fingers in my mouth 

          and my body pressed against 

          the firm hollow of the air mattress 

          we knelt on to deflate

When the hissing stopped, we folded it

We stacked the pillows and the sheets

We did everything you do to leave

Margaret Ross