Tomatoes
I’m on a parapet looking down
at the upturned faces and those voices
rising up like feathers in an updraft.
I am afraid of heights, but I know
I’m going to fall, and in the knowing my fear
is singed, my will is a skeleton hung
together by silver twine, on my cold wrists
there are bracelets, inlaid turquoise with silver,
hammered thin by a Hopi boy in
a boy whose face is wide and soft, and he blinks
each time the small hammer strikes.
I once had a girl,
once lived with in gray air of her cigarettes,
her dark-paneled room. Her eyes gold-brown,
her face so finely wrought
like a kind of porcelain.
The way she brushed her hair down
across her scapula and vertebrae
left me weak and fearful, I thought I might turn
into a feather and float out of the room. She had
a friend whose name was Paige,
who had a mother
who did away with herself on the summer
solstice, four bottles of pills, she sat
in a chaise lounge near the garden,
by a thicket of tomatoes overgrown
and unkempt, heavy, red planets so full,
and Paige said every day that August she ate them
with a pinch of salt, she said they tasted
like nothing, nothing at all, like air she said
