February 15th: On Innocence
I wish I could take you
with the appetite of a child who has never sinned.
Bread
Stephen Berg
it’s not that purity is overrated so much
as it is misunderstood, so much
as it is thumbed through a skein
of pain and longing and sought
in the dark of that longing--the way praying
hands fish inside the mobius dark
of yarn to try to find the tip
of the other beginning
how the fingers pinch and pull and do not
could never know what they’re feeling
for and even if it’s not a grope
even if it is the very thread of respect
it’s a five digit tangle of lost ways.
Think about it: the purity of snow, falling and fallen
the purity of a baby, human or otherwise
the purity of a river’s beginning, if you can find it
the purity of first time lips on first time lips
the purity of giving (and what a word because giving is giving away) birth
the purity of an apple blossom, or was it a fig?
the purity of that first morning with, and then without
the purity of a bruise blue enough to be the sea and it is the sea
beneath the purity of the skin whatever color it is
The purity of the first sin that drips its liquid on a nipple
of a girl’s first blood
of her second
Listen: all of it is souped in the chaos of pain
and if it at all lies quiet while it’s held or beheld
while it’s soothed and soothed into a wound
while the honey of it is spun out of the comb to drip
down the spigot of a lover’s tongue
don’t tell me it doesn’t hurt. It does hurt. More
than any other hurt there is. If you don’t
feel it you’re either lying or it’s not pure. And then:
if you’ve opened a vein for it let me
kiss your pure wound. Let me, woman, give you
this fruit.
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