It's a feast, this fruit resting in its skin,
anticipating the mouth that will release
the sun, the thirty-one long July childhoods,
its generations of seeds. Like currency,
embryos exchange their energies,
stop the growth of one melon
to enable the growth of another.

You can make anything perfect
if you look only with your eyes.
A yellow begonia waxes over the table
like a moon. There is a single glass
stemmed on the edge of loneliness.
Who knows where her mate is,
there is no time to search.

And in between the handled basket
and hollowed wooden bowl, like
a metaphor for how we keep
and cradle love, sighs the infant skull
of something with adult horns.

The bananas are rotting,
the avocado can sense the decay.
And the red cabbage begs
for another chance to prove itself,
bravely refusing to bleed like a beet.

This is our jubilee of everyday hunger,
rejoice in it like a prayer. This is the thanks
we give ourselves for the harvest,
for the long nights unsure if we can
even love another heart, say nothing
of the artichoke on the yellow plate.



Geography, in Retrospect

Had he ever asked for directions
I'd have said sometimes I am more
geography text than woman. If you

can find me at all, I am complicated,
an X chromosome marking a spot
always in relation to the moon,

a woman telling time by standing still.
I am the place resentment goes to be quiet.
I am the hand of gravity for the waxwing.

My hips know the dance that brings
down the rain. My hands know the prayers
that plant children. If I were fruit, I'd grow

tangled somewhere in the middle of the earth,
the apple of apology, the permission of a pear,
or the kind of grape that makes wine wish

for bread. Had he ever wondered, I'd have
hidden scars and said: I am here, standing quietly,
offering any Adam a rib and a loaf of bread.

CARRIE BECKER'S poems have appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Sisters Today, and Sigma Tau Delta's Journal, The Rectangle. This spring her poems were accepted for publication in the 2001 Wisconsin Poet's Calendar and an anthology of poems under the working title Women's Letters to Their Unborn Children. Her essay, Babes: Campus controversy over what to call women was published in the MSN online magazine, Underwire.

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