Red Mango

I haven’t the heart just now to flay your skin, consume your flesh; you are too beautiful to eat. The rose-pink dawn of your skin conceals your molten gold sweet flesh. Your shape has taken possession of my eyes, those tireless hunters of the beautiful. I gaze at you as I would a small exotic bird, smoothed down in warm red plumage, your underside dulled by care, as when a mother-bird incubates her eggs. Shape requires touching, and weight is the surest proof of substance. In my hand, I stroke your skin, smooth and firm as a lover’s breast; sensations rise like mists from ancient dawns, awaken my hands and fingers; words burst from my mouth like tropical birds taking flight as poems, my mind drinking potent juices, eager to taste long hidden sayings, whispers of lovers. I spotted you in a woven basket among green mangoes still struggling to maturity and ripeness. You, though, you have already achieved it, bright and confident as a bougainvillea, glowing like a dwarf star, a living heart, so that I was forced to stop. I heard you as a cry as from an orphan torn from its motherland, where hills rush upward like great drafts of wind, offering paeans to blue skies and mountain breezes. then rushing downward like melting glacial rivulets of happy laughter, from distant shining snows. Tomorrow I will eat your flesh, make you part of mine. Your sweetness will expand in my mouth like morning light reaching to awaken edges of distant green dormant fields, and for a moment, we will be one, water with air, air with wind, wind with clouds, life with life. Beauty is not the eternal quest of aging poets or philosophers but a momentary spark in a world of raging winds and dark storms, spring flowers of a capricious day – scented, heady, fragile in the crushing shadow of existence. And, then, like the universe itself, a mere fluctuating image, lost in the empty skull of Time, the eyes of an eternal hunger, its gaze steadfast, patient, waiting to consume us all.