In His Lecture on Resonance, the Poet Instructs Us

The poet tells me I will be redeemed if I embrace
dying. Mortality, fondled like a lover’s balls
will give my words the dirt blessing,
fill my mouth with salt and sweet as if my tongue
licked up a man’s thigh to the dark earth scent
alive at the edge of language. Knowing
I’m on my way out, he says,
should be the fruit of every day.
But such short days—and what if they include
the drop and rise of my slick belly, breasts
against a lover’s skin? He never says,
stroked clean and rolled again in sweat,
how I could crave another kind of death?