Raspberry Studies

1
You have to pick one story, say, for all
your gestures; let it be the way the hand's
reach pulls the rest of you into the thicket,
each adjustment unheroic until
raspberry is a state of mind that craves
what it cannot remember once the flash
of ne'er brewed liquor's made its jump from tongue
to brain.  Again, again, you pick and eat
a ruddy neural splash so rarified
it hovers just above all words for taste.


2
a cap, a cup, a lip, a cusp,
a wall with plasma mortar,
the compound eye of carmine lust
both vessel and corpuscle,
a dome of wine with tiny skins,
translucence amniotic
a soma mind with ruby lens
elusively erotic


3
If light's a needle stitching
selvaged sky to ravelled foliage,
here's her red thimble working
in a garment thickly pinned.


4
Red blastula is fluidly adrift
in memory awaiting its next stage
of evolution, a mimetophage
devouring likenesses reworked in thrifty
knots to thwart the literal ear.  Each seeded
cell has its own fuse and could explode
in acts of information, tell its coded 
story, do the vegetative deed.
Or floating free of some appointed destiny,
stripped from the core it covered, is
the amnion itself to glory risen,
past utility, past emptiness.
No saviour's imprimatur on the veil,
the Rubus cup itself become the grail.