Poem: Flesh Divine; wilderness years, burst peaches, a soprano

What I love about this poem is its synthesis of images. Baseball cards. (Overhead: A co-worker enthusing and reminiscing about about his collection.  Remembering: Shiny photographs of Maury Wills or Don Drysdale or Sandy Kaufax (Dodgers, Dodgers, Dodgers) and the stats which meant nothing to me but their presence was an indication of transcendence.

Cadged peek:  Into a nursery in a friend's house. The mobile above the crib revealed a firmament of ceiling stars, a mock universe of glittering plasma, mock plasma.

A belief:  In wilderness years. Simon of the Desert.  The Desert Fathers.  The Prophets.  I witnessed myself in a wilderness in younger days, not a barren scape, not at all; a place to roam and choose. I pretend I'm no longer in the wilderness but doubt that's true. Enough. A different style of poetry which sprang out a few years ago {different from what I'm writing these days}:

Flesh Divine

Let any place paw on flesh divine, monkey bread
female nudged and godly, this thing like pears dewed
and burst peaches, heaped splashy in containers
brightly strange weird as first voyage, one of two.
Don’t trade looks like baseball cards, each with its
value private, graven image and boasts. Remember
our years wilderness encaved, snake in one life-flash,
pumping hard her wings, angel next, and again friend
serpent twisting, digesting life slow-like as he mute
wriggles without grip of the plan’s nod to anarchic
inclusion of the random, which—if we’d accepted
before a wilderness of frozen constellations, not like
charts but mobiles in a nursery when the switch is off
and parents peek at blessed babes like us nodding out
to stenciled reality—we would disallow Teddy’s
nonallergenic love a safer source than each other.
All sweetie words ring rare true as soloist sopranos.
It’s not the heard mattering. Expecting little, receive,
grateful someone, where, there, hating not, killing not.
Every day is a sacred blessed day is your day is this.

____________
Sarah Sarai, pub. in Issue 1 of Numinous Spiritual Poetry, 2008