Triolet Quintet

1
How else to love the world but to rise
each morning from the bed of your making

into the addle and dross the hours devise.
How else to love the world but to rise

as though order is the ardor that drives
this life between waking and waking.

How else to love the world but to rise
each morning from the bed of your making.

2
What comfits of nipples, of fists
and toes, your mouth accords you,

flesh your flesh cannot resist.
What comfits of nipples, of fists

and toes, this carnal life insists
we covet and give tongue to.

What comfits of nipples, of fists
and toes, your mouth accords you.

3
Love has made you eloquent,
your tongues laps of rapturous wit

that praise sweet abandonment.
Love has made you eloquent

and dumb, its intent the silent
tongue two tongues transmit.

Love has made you eloquent,
your tongues laps of rapturous wit.

4
Lust, little despot of the flesh,
morning and evening you incite us

to rollick in your goatish congress.
Lust, little despot of the flesh,

you breach even the opiate press
of sleep, your daft accomplice.

Lust, little despot of the flesh,
morning and evening you incite us.

5
Though you say you will never wed
again, Father, never say never

to the bonds of the marriage bed.
Though you say you will never wed,

what but love has been your bread
and meat, your lifelong fever?

Though you say you will never wed
again, Father, never say never.

--As published in the New Orleans Review, Vol. 29, No.2

Wild Onion

In botany, Allium stellatum, of the family
Liliaceae, cousin to trillium, Solomon's-seal
and bellwort, whose root, bulb, leaf and stem

are edible or medicinal; fodder for squirrel,
elk, deer, poultice for boils, anodyne for fever,
sting of bee and wasp, amulet to ward off

dizziness or croup--from the Old French
oignon, and the Latin unio, meaning oneness--
organism of obfuscation and trumpery

whose lavender blossoms deftly belie
the flagrant acidic breath that draws us
now, step-by-step, up from the river's bank

to its grassy open bed. Siren of the olfactory--
most evocative of the senses--its leaves
bristle and flare, summoning to each of us

a summer kitchen, and in it, a mother, aproned
and dewy, weeping at her chopping block. . . .
But we are, after all, animal, and what seduces

here, in the shank of the day, is vegetable:
a booty we will dig for like dogs and take home
for our supper, a shill, a shindy, a caustic pearl.

--As published in Poetry, February 2001