My Mouth Quick with Many Bees

BY PAUL CARROLL
My mouth is snow slowly caking that stiff pigeon.
My mouth, the intricately moist machinery of a plant.
I have forgotten if I ever had a mouth.

I have two mouths.

One like warm rain;
or wind manipulating the worn limbs of an elm.

My mouth knows nothing of music.

Or of the oils of love.

Its shape is the shadow of innumerable pigeons;

its words, at times, their bones.

My eyes too know of shadows.

And of the delicate hairs of my grandmother's heart.
And of the plums of puberty.
And the shadow of the eggs inside the woman who moves
immemorially through clover

past the wheat field and alfalfa

and the 1890 Roman Catholic cemetary near the farm in Palos
Park.

My eyes know of the blue shadow of the one desire.

The mind does not;

it is an animal, ignorant, ambiguous, talking,
as it must, with many voices.

I walk toward you as if waading through the waves in somebody

else's dream.

I walk toward you as if wading through the waves in somebody

else's dream.

I shall survive this death, even though the heart is

a shadow of a bone.
Or thick glass.

My mouth quick with many bees.

Paul Carroll, "My Mouth Quick With Many Bees" from New and Selected Poems. Copyright
1978 by Paul Carroll. Reprinted by permission of Maryrose Carroll.

Source: New and Selected Poems (The Yellow Press, 1978)