Deliver unto me a full work-up, though know
I’m fully capable of getting worked up.
Together, let’s work it through: I was delivered,
delivered you, was not delivered but worked,
labored at the crosshairs of that fat red hatch,
worked outside of the white H on blue.
This was my labor. There was never any work-up
but I worked my way into your way out,
did not give over, worked like a bolt, or was I the screw?
Or was I screwed too tight, too worked-up to let you come through?

No, I was fine, and plain.
No one doctored me, fixed me up,
a plain cake mix into a beautiful dessert.
I was left to be, undoctored. At the crosshatch
of two thin red hairs I was let to be,
be drained of my meaning.
If I ever had beauty I did not want it doctored now.
Love comes in a long open scream,
a stream, a river, a rain that is the inside hem of imagining.
Imagine the layers of ice inside a cake.

My milk wells up to pour out,
a great white sorrow, the purse of love.
It does not come unbidden from me,
some bolt of lightning from the other side of my undeliverable body.
I was not doctored, so I nursed.
I thrill to nurse. Because of you
and me there was no nurse and I nurse you still,
nurse you into stillness,
the broad white H dissecting some other sky.
The snakes work their slither around a staff
while we are unstaffed, unsnaked,
a slither of embroidered work—blood, milk—
working its path down our means.

©2006 Arielle Greenberg

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