We are the Hunger

Anita Barrows

from We Are the Hunger (Unpublished manuscriopt)

A Celtic tradition holds that, before differentiated

  life came to be, everything was the clay of earth

1

Once we lay together

in the earth,

part of the earth.

For a long time we

revolved, clay

suffused with clay,

undemarcated, wordless.

2

My hands

that were not

yet hands

mingled with yours, a surge

of undulant blind roots

slowly veining the dark, thinning

over the dayless nightless ages

to wrist, thumb, forefinger.

Tendril. Stem. Where there was only

a single substance

came a steady pulse of holding & opening,

a rustling of forgetting & wild growth.

So we found

we had been given eyes, we disentangled ourselves

from each other

and stood, we shook off

the body that clung to us.

3

We came into a century of fire.

We ate, weren't we hungry? The incinerator-smell

was all around us, the tips of flaming towers

like stars in the amber haze over the city.

We kept wondering what we belonged to.

We passed one another on rainy streets,

from the windows of trains

flashing by in opposite directions. We drove

ahead of each other through darkened tunnels,

checking the rearview mirror for a hand

raised a little from the steering wheel

in a gesture of greeting, of recognition.

Much we threw into the fire.

At the tables of those

who had nothing else, we broke

contaminated bread. We were hungry,

we ate. We planted plants we were told

leeched poison from the soil. We did not know

that always, in everything we did,

we were seeking, we were approaching

each other. We pressed our ears close to

what stayed alive. Sometimes

the odor of burning was masked

by a fragrance of lindenblossom, acacia.

Sometimes, though the fields

we moved through

were thick with smoke,

it seemed to us we were streaming

through corridors of light.

4

Earth of whom we are born. In whose body

we ache & burn.

I found the raccoon skull at the edge of the trail,

the rim of the eyesocket

brittle as dry leaves. It came apart

in my hand. Your hand

reaches for mine: water, carbon,

other minerals. Our bodies are movement & tug

of gravity, fields of grasses & wind

combing the fields. Everything we touch

is a shape held together

by its own

stubborn wanting. Oh look at the light

coming between the branches,

igniting the leaves

of the philodendron. They are

turned, they are made

to receive it in just

this way. And isn't the sunlight,

too, longing to be that

greenness? We are

the one who desires,

the object

of desire, & desire itself

We are the food & what eats it, & we are

the hunger.