I’m not talk­ing about the under­side of a kitten’s
bel­ly, or the lay­ers of dress on a mod­est woman’s

corpse. I don’t mean that beneath the skin there’s
a world of vein, meat and bone. No, I’m talk­ing about

man­tle and core – the vis­cous, shift­ing substrata
beneath the camel’s hoof, beneath the sand,

beneath the crust beneath the sand. I think there are
birds in there, fly­ing around inside the earth’s body,

birds fly­ing over oceans, streams and lakes, children
laugh­ing beside rivers, moth­ers call­ing them home

to sup­per by beat­ing wood­en spoons on the sides
of alu­minum pots. It doesn’t mat­ter that we can’t see

them, or even that my the­o­ry has been disproven.
I go where the laugh­ter is, pure and sim­ple, and I say

this ball of clay is real­ly an onion, a snake coiled
around a bounc­ing ball, a swirl of petals exploding

from bud. It’s sim­ple, real­ly: love is the pack on a
hitchhiker’s back, every­thing he owns, everywhere

he goes, the only arti­cle that can’t be left behind.
And we’ve all got our thumbs out, point­ed towards

that oth­er realm, the one beneath the skin, beneath
the bone and mar­row and veiny streams of blood, where gods

await us like lovers, like dense smoke, like cracked
and for­got­ten mir­rors, reflect­ing the sin­gu­lar route home.

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