This next poem is called "The Kiss."
And it's for my youngest son Kevin.
"A glaze of ice glistens in the manure and rutted mud
of the plowed-under garden as the brittle crack
and squish of my greased boots leads
me plodding beside my vague reflection this crisp April
morning, as if my image still were in the thawing Earth
I planted, and last year's buried spring still
stirred and shined within the slick clay of the chunky soil.
With boot-grooves packed with mud,
my cold cleft toes imagine they can feel the rising moisture.
Stopping by a three-year red delicious tree
to scrape a fresh bud with my fingernail I
see that it is green inside, alive
having survived the winter in my care."
Excuse me, I'm going to interrupt myself because I
should have told you something.
If the young fruit trees are not wrapped during the winter,
they will be eaten by mice or rabbits.
And I wrapped my trees with aluminum foil
and then I put some tape around the aluminum foil
so I can get a tight around the tree right down to the ground.
And I keep that protection on for the winter.
So you need to understand that here.
Let me move back just a little bit.
"With boot-grooves packed with mud,
my cold cleft toes imagine they can feel the rising moisture.
Stopping by a three-year red delicious tree
to scrape a fresh bud with my fingernail,
I see that it is green inside, alive
having survived the winter in my care.
Yes, it is soft and moist.
It has come through under my care,
and I remove the wrapping-- aluminum foil and tape--
around its trunk.
It saved it from the gnawing mice and voles
who girdle fruit tree barks beneath the snow.
Now on the yellowed grass, the perfect turds of starving deer,
glimmering like planets, circle the tree,
and the faint waft of skunk brushes me with a puff of wind.
I like it, it quickens my sense at the exquisite edge
where pleasure cloys, where one knows surely what
the human limits are.
I kneel beside another tree as if to dress a child for school,
snipping a dead branch as sharp sun
strikes the creased foil by my knee, catches my dazzled eyes
and makes them tear.
A stranger here might think I truly wept.
Spring blood sings in my veins even
as it did some 30 years ago when I planted my first apple tree.
No lessening of pleasure dulls the sun's feel on my arms,
or warming chill, or the female curves
I see along the hill that fruit trees make
when my eyes follow slowly, caressing every slope,
then moving on.
I am gathering my life in now with a breath.
I know what thoughts I must hold back to let my careful body
thrive as bone by bone it was designed to do.
A gust of wind comes off the upper slope.
Having followed me, my youngest son crying,
'watch me dad,' runs along the ridge much faster than I
thought he could, launching his huge black birthday kite.
Catching the wind, the kite leaps for the sky,
steadies itself as the string goes taut.
It glides above me, swoops, floating its shadow
and my squinting eyes, that pruning
snipers still in hand, I shield from shocking light.
Designed like a great bat--
hooked wings and pointed ears and long white fangs
grinning like Dracula--
it swoops again, eclipsing the sun, hovers, dives at me.
I see the mock blood oozing at its mouth and random dribbles
brightening its belly just as it crashes in the apple tree.
I take more shining foil from the tree
and roll it into two enormous teeth,
set them in my mouth like fangs, and chase
my son across the field, running faster than I thought I could
until my ribs smolder in my chest and my clay hooves ache.
He screams as if the demons of his sleep,
returning from the frozen underground,
were actually upon him--
as I catch him, grapple him down, sink my gleaming teeth
into his pulsing throat and suck,
suck deeper than I have ever sucked,
tasting his life sweeter than any apple I have known."
It's just make believe.
[LAUGHTER]
Just like all poems.