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Memory is a coracle
that skirts the pewter ring of the pupil
like currents of the Atlantic around the Sargasso.
I am a mariner brimming with stories.
The bowsprit pricks the halogen sun;
birds riddle the sky, little hieroglyphs.
Light inflames the wind like a nettle rash.
I had impetigo when I was six.
My body, a jaundiced crust,
grew fat with contagion. I had it again when I was ten.
This time skin fell in clumps.
The sound was the rasp of snakeskin. I shed for weeks,
and emerged smooth as stalactite.
That was the Spring of Blood.
At thirteen, I wore a Maypole dress,
ribbons like flypaper, boys buzzing.
Their hands, like poison oak, crept up my legs
to the hot, equatorial current of my body.
My nipples were two Braille characters,
each delineating a separate pleasure,
too hard to be flowers.
Ten summer hands blindly read the topography of my skin
as I lay in the pricked turf
of a golf course like a shallow puddle.
Between my legs, short, weedy tendrils aspiring
to sun, and adolescent fingers.
It was primal because they were young and I was young,
and nobody told us how to do it.
Oh, how the mind defaces them.
They were all one boy, one pleasure,
a heap of flushed cheeks and soft thumbs.
There was no place for thought or regret--
only the madrigal of orgasm and the magisterial sun
that told us when to go home.
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