Walnut

2018

Walnut

I

Juglans, jovus glans. Literally, Jupiter’s nuts.
It’s nice to see men haven’t changed in two thousand years.
I imagine your namer has rubber nads bouncing behind his pickup,
and thinks women, like walnuts, improve with a beating.

Maybe not. I’ve seen truck nutz in the parking lot,
attachment torn and dangling,
like some medieval memo to an obnoxious neighbour,
grimed and limp, obscene garbage.
God’s balls fall off, a tree curves up from the ground,
I think of Cronus throwing his father’s junk into the sea.

Let us make man in Our image, He says. Be fruitful and multiply,
He says. I wonder to whom he speaks?

II

That’s not what I first think though, sludging through the flooded goat-trail
behind Middlesex to the grad club, and see the green rinds split open,
damp flesh a velvet rot, womb-dark.
I think Timaeus, I think chora, I think
the fecund black of a broken field, its furrows walked by a girl with a star-map
when the lights at the house go out.

Carya, the Greeks called you, they saw
a brain in your broken kernel. You were a girl
who loved Dionysus and his madness to the point of death,
and he made you a tree for it. Your second life is wilderness,
is propagation, is a hundred hundred men trying to carve you out
of your own body, Caryatid, cut you down to size
the ceiling of their imagination, as if their visions could
contain you, their roofs fell on their heads,
as time returned you to yourself.