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The Edible Myth // Clinton Frakes

for Merhoff

We eat & are eaten & the grain riots at each November’s turn.
Trembling stars tickle the black plum & all the stock on the farm.
Gogol’s pig matter-of-factly snarfed up a stumbling chick
Feeding in the black mud morning of the Russian steppe.

Raw or cooked was always the question: Homer’s rhapsodies of
Winespill & roasts, ships launched on the hermetic hour,
Orange-robed Masai drinking bloodmilk & E. coli on the hot Kenyan flat.
The banyan sheds another arm. We learn bread in the seed’s flour

Plucked by open ache of mouth--a chunk of day on an
Archipelago born of secret mantle plumes. Cracks occur to shelter fern,
fissures for lichen, & therein an aphid of infinite burning.
The ore of Darwinian atolls subsides to the nibble of Pacific Gyre.

Only eight cells of a human body are never replaced, & they starve,
Demand a minute each hour, crave seared flesh & the wrists
Bearing the bowl, like a mantis locked in the notion of its catch.
The honu swim farther each year, seeking a familiar metallic taste &

The Earth has taken a skew--no mele to put us at ease,
But the bending legs of the egret remember in their stride the
Face of every meadow. The trill of the pre-dawn thrush opens
The stoma of a million leaves & their breath is the milk of our glow.