Palabras
(for La Diosa) 

Here it is almost ready to rain 

It is as if the weather would begin
a long sentence 

but keeps stalling over the first few words - 

a drop here three drops a little wind 

Then, a moment later, the manic stutter of cicadas
who are desperate to explain their thing for trees 

but somehow stick on that one odd syllable.
It is this way at times. 

A man keeps tapping the tip of his nose,
his brain tensed like a spider,
but what's the use? All sense runs away. 

It's as if every word were a roach
and the need to speak
like turning on the kitchen light. 

Let's say, for example, that I love you
and must tell you why. 

Your eyes... see what I mean? 

The taste of your mouth... 

Do you see how I sweat? 

Your fingers. The fields.
The fine, fine weave of your skin.
I want to say so much about so much. 

It as if my heart were crammed with grapes - 

each of which I would slip inside you,
then savor lazily lying under a willow
while the long shade wrapped its legs around me. 

Of course I talk like this now - my heart
is swollen with grapes, 

grapes I would steer carefully with my lips
up and over the Aztec-brown swerves de tus nalgas 

grapes I would squeeze then sip
from the tiny chalice of your navel
while God held both of us in Her all-knowing mouth. 

Now everyone wants to question my appropriateness.
I can even feel my parents, faraway, squinting
and crossing their arms. 

But how can I not say that I'm saying?
Because of you and your witch's talk, woman 

my heart is a grape - big as a man -
a grape full of gasoline, a grape so thoroughly grown 

it would be a zeppelin
if it didn't walk around all day
wringing its hands - 

a grape that wears glasses, a grape
that breaks chairs, a grape that mumbles
with its mouth full of chips,
a grape so well hidden in itself
that it has dissapeared entirely. 

and then come these words 

all at once, as if from nowhere 

like a storm. 

 - Tim Seibels