Inflammatory

In the mountains we chewed melons,
sifting everything as two seeds caught
slippery between the rockiest white teeth,

bald 12,000 foot fists, veined with memoratic
rivers, a small feeling of past lives... you are seeing
visions of the long-haired boy from the river

with your neurons in the dark— a Dutch
sans colors, his leathery belly as barefoot
as the operating floor, your heathery hands

shook like a hummingbird with patchy
instinct, tracing bee-lines with purple
chalk, scooping in the cison, hopscotch

with a coda, round and round
we always gnaw on the same subjects,
teetering over a stanza and landing

on an ant bed of spruce and
the impermanence of first loves—the
mountains hold memories the way

muscles do— a cornsilk glacial tear
greases a fishy earthen canal
which you probe with blue gloves

to count centimeters, calling avalanche
from behind the operatic curtain
which opens like the palms of Atlas

to hold the crying pink sun
chewing oxygen and his mother’s bloody
skyscrape, the world gasping for black

while you stand cataloging carmine
rings on a fallen spruce, wondering
how this time of year, seasonless and

shifty, always reminds you of that boy
from the river, how nothing you studied
in medical school ever made sense and yet

the decomposing shells of birds
smell familiar, and the unstitched
threads of your mind are momentarily loosened,

asking me why the present moment
is never lucid, why light impregnates
through smaller objects

and how could the watermelon-shaped caste
cover horizons unbirthed
to your jealous pale eyes,

scalpels to the bark, each old lover
itching the heart which, like the never-ending
sentence, is inflammatory when left

unoperated.