Sticky Fingers

Mick Jagger I want you to pry the top off this maple syrup for me while I flip the pancakes—I didn’t wipe it down before I closed it last & now I fear it’s sealed forever. Mick Jagger last weekend I made out with a boy on my couch while an image of you gyrated onscreen—he turned off the lamp by yanking the cord from the wall & then you were the only light. I can’t be sure but I don’t think I’d spill over if I made you breakfast—though certainly I wouldn’t be one of the girls in gauzy white, out of focus, nonchalant as I wander your hotel room. I want to bite your young mouth but it’s not 1965 any longer—& never was, for me. Mick, my imagination isn’t big enough for you & anyway I’m distracted by the mint chapstick of that boy on my couch, the one I said couldn’t stay ‘til morning, oh Mick those women in the audience lost their minds because they knew they could never touch you, come here, let me examine your hands.

Oh yes.

We drive on a winding road in midsummer, woods surround
us, we hear screams. Cicadas, you think falsely. We drive
and I pat your knee, say, cicadas, and we smell a skunk,
keep driving. We know the lies of our bodies, and deception
is a kind of love. We get to a neighborhood where trees
uproot the sidewalks and people trip over them, drunk
on new friendship or fresh energy or which season or just
fucking vodka and the roots say how could you
ferment those potatoes why would you steal them from the ground.
When I finally got a muse, he told me all the trees are women
with babies trapped inside—he told me, I made it
so. Sometimes when a raccoon makes its home
in a tree’s trunk, he unearths a tiny baby’s foot, toes wiggling.
The raccoon won’t even bite. Ground is everything
for everyone, and each piece feels the presence
of the others—so when a Russian potato is ripped
from the soil our plain American trees feel it, and revolt.
The babies turn over and birds hear their cries—the birds
shit on the windshield of your car and the wipers are broken
so it’s there until it rains. We drive out and then home again,
patting each other’s knees and blaming the noise on cicadas.