You’d have thought me a blushed newbie, to look at my face then.
And you’d have been wrong.
Discolored, yes. But that was an accident on the pommel horse.
That was the beating I took from the wind,
trying to work my way uptown.
If I retracted, I’d retract just like the milksnake’s scarlet skin:
welcome to the past. Here is my private self to greet you.
I am the spitting image of the night’s prehensile lips,
ready to clamp you against the solid surface of my palate.
And I am the new sap, aroused by spring, the hard xylem,
the knotty stick whose protuberance sends forth new shoots.
Didn’t you say you always wanted a child?
I can be that too: the whippersnapper who follows you.
Or maybe you want the youth who’ll do your labors
and be paid in what little kindness you can manage.
Go back and try to snag me while I’m yet unspoilt.
The morning’s saporous dew, the early strut of the cockerel,
the first fugitive act of copulation, which,
because it is a first, feels like a last.
You picked it all when you picked me out:
what satisfied you, what couldn’t love you back.
The endless act of revising. And with that, the revision.