The Sacrifice

I wrote this about cooking lamb today before I fully understood the assignment. I thought I'd share anyway, although it's very 'poeticized' and I'll probably redo the assignment again correctly. I won't be able to make it to next class, so please any comments are welcome.

THE SACRIFICE

I wanted this to be a poem about loving you from afar like some god

but here you are on the sofa in sweats this Sunday

as I cook some real and hearty lamb and how real

it is that god is nowhere in this apartment except

for on the football field on the TV screen.

Since age eight I was a vegetarian, but by the time

I had met you, you had made me eat burnt bacon, then chicken

wings, and so now I associate all meats and strong flavors with the turbine

of your love and carnal knowledge of you.

I toss the meat in the bread crumbs, stick it in the oven.

When I am not well, when I am ill, I can't bear to eat.

I wanted to say how the stars of your distant kisses burn

and prickle like the gut of a million fire ants crawling over the lost

universes of my hands when I am away from you, in the hospital, I wanted

to call you my salt and pepper lover in which my earth turns, and sun

and say how you light the match of your jalapeno tongue whose only home is my tongue

upon our love as real as this meat, but I have to mention your belly, groaning,

and no bigger than a bottle of wine or two,

and mention your hands,

fitting methodically now to the size of a small B cup, and how

the dark shores of your chest

are only as large as the dead bodies of my nightmares

that I bury there each morning with the memories and the burdens.

My beloved you are not to me a sachet of myrrh

    resting between my breasts.

My beloved you are not to me a cluster of henna blossoms

    from the vineyards of En Gedi.

No husband. Maybe you are the strong garlic stuck on the skin of this Sunday lamb

that I tear, delicately, with my teeth

on the last few bites of the seventh rib of the rack

which you share, as always, in increasingly smaller bites

with me.

Youngest brother of three,

hungry turnip,

somewhere within you, a ship whistles and moans.

Somewhere in the distant past, how the lilies bowed down

to you again and again in the sweet Ohio wind, until

you came, at last, to lay down your face beside mine,

and rescue me.

--Annette