While Cutting Carrots for Dinner

Posted on 15 May 2010

How easy
could my rhythmic crusade
shift its wooden blade
and slide the steel and double-hone
through fleshy her
as grimace lost bewilderment
in those dazed eyes and fingers
tremble with the why
“Oh!” now and all of it quite over
though she still stands steel rod straight

with blood across the floor,
a tidal wave for ants,

and her tight gasp, the “Oh!”
as fingers scrabble for
the handle boned

and once it starts my knife
now moving Mozart-like just wants
to go on. Just wants.
For once it’s breached the kitchen
it’ll leave no witness wants

the blossom underfoot to grow into the liquid
moonscape that was once her Eden

shiv that shivers deeper, deeper, gullet down

forgive, us Lord, forgive us now
to soon slip on linoleum
with all its growing rose gold red
so cheap to drink

a million dead, two million, three-
if it isn’t them it will be me –

so send us on our merry way
as I recoil from licking all her salty
ocean fading splendor down.