God wrote two books

God wrote two books


I.

The insides of my skin are singing
as summer runs like lilies in rain

My blood maps my body in new patterns
many times a day,
and each wash and remaking
brings the veins closer to happiness
and collapse

II.

I hold the toad long enough to tell him all my quiet fears,
he seems to like that some,
pushes his dry soft belly against my palm,
nosing the spaces between my fingers,
asking me where my webbing’s
got to, and have I lost it along with everything else?

Down in the dirt,

his jelly cheeks brush outward into night air

as he tries to hold me with his sticky slick toes,

but he is very small

and I too human to condense to his caress,

so he leaves me with one final frog-lipped kiss

and pulls away over grass and weed

The worms are better listeners

and beautiful by starlight,

their organ skin dark and lustrous

under the moon glow

I watch them bully the dirt into helixes     

and half circles for their over-hearted

bodies to languish beneath—

they are all going someplace,

and I whisper to them some of my sadness,

that they may carry off pieces

to places far away from me

The grass is best of all,

and that is because it makes me up:

I know that veins aren’t so much hollow

spaghetti straws as they are fibrous

weeds knitted up under my skin

as like worms they tunnel their way

through dark cells,

mounting into stalk highways,

breaking over lips,

fanning out into the thirsty mouths of my organs

I pull a strand of grass from the ground,

and it says a reluctant farewell

in the same way my hair speaks to my scalp—

I know that this means we’re really all the same,

the toad, the worms, the living dirt,

and if I’m logical, then I’d also know

that if I lie here long enough

the human parts break down

as every little fiber and wet thing takes them in,

sucks them up, slickens themselves with feeling

and bumps away like the toad

And then I say goodbye too

to all the human bits

and hello to the dirt, the toad,

the worms and all the places

they have always meant to take me