Marital Bones

We store up overripe fruits
like manna from heaven. 
Here I consider how apples
hold their seeds in a soft flesh— 
how I bit to the core
and swallowed them without
knowing. Now I eat

daisies and lick 
the lilies without a care, 
without a glance at the windowsill 
where I no longer sit 
because I have given up 
on solving the plight of honey bees.  
Yesterday I believed

all things could be grasped 
by pulling down 
the blinds and trusting that 
the brain won’t calculate
the exponents perched
beside our miscues.
Because mental dexterity

may stave off dementia  
I divide the hour into the minutes 
and create improper fractions. 
Here I am improper and 
I say this not with a stifled tongue
or tongue-in-cheek. 
There is no reasoning with the weatherman

when he predicts a risk of tornadoes until 10 p.m. 
And then as the watch expires
I say come here  
to you (your face usually a bit unshaven) 
and I tell you to listen 
and I talk rapidly 
about the human genome project

and how no cure for cancer 
will be found, too many varieties 
and too many chances  
for those mitotic cells to arrest.  
If the universe were to shift one 
billionth to the forty-fifth degree to the left 
—you close your eyes as I speak

and I don’t know if you’re listening— 
it would implode.  
What a way to go, the universe 
ending with a giant suck of light.
It’s this earthly grass we do not eat. 
Good god but it’s black when I pull
these shades and pick

sweet corn at the toll 
of midnight. Our planet owns 
only one moon and she is silent.
I shower because our skin cells
mesh and multiply. I lick envelopes
so traces of my DNA will
roam and moan about the earth.