A poem for Brigid

On the mountain we'd sleep in the heavy shade - green figs like
testicles and the leaf palms cracking with pungent milk - delib-
erately, having been told of the vaporous harm to the dreamer.
Donkeys shifting their fly-beseiged, sundazed gaze met and held
ours; the goats would stop because of the short hobble they bore,
their slitted eyes in suggestive seduction fixing us blackly every
few feet of film, those stills of them every few feet of hill an-
nointed now as if memory were a kind of solution. We pile rocks
on our bodies partly unearthed and sweat the weight wet. The air
is still and imagining it through the labyrinth of rock and
moisture against the skin in a breeze stiffens the nipple. Starfish,
colossal under mounds seen from above, the bleached soft-colored
rocks look too much like breasts, and the trouble you took for the
angle and height makes it obvious. We get up heavy with stone
shadow, each muscle rising like a sea-cow, and fall into the green
cove, afloat like the three tomatoes we cool and swim around,
lazily pushing one back if it should stray, too intimate now you
said to eat for lunch, so you sucked on the salty skin, you did,
even though you were posing. Then there are mermaids, and
other riffraff and dross.

(Olga Broumas and Jane Miller)

My poem for Brigid is inspired by an Old Mermaid Sanctuary. To see a list of those blogs offering poems for Brigid today, go here.