Orangerie
(for V)

                   The way you make love is the way God will be with you.
                                                                                      —RUMI
 
I
 
The arc of your boneless back flags above me.
We are blind discoverers, the nine seas pool
between us, blue curves, maritime, sheath of
surrender, limbed night.
 
What sweeter world could be voyaged from
the earth’s center, pieced of figsuckle,
orange, the twice-licked skin of key limes,
breath of peppermint, braided, burning.
 
II
 
The long twin inches of my hands take the
whole night to ski the two pineapple halves
of you; brown baklava pieced over a caramel
cooler of skin. The monsoon is early.
 
Two marsupials coax deeper into the pouch of
wet night. Wandering inside the hour of the lung
hoping to turn conch by day. Our outside skins,
well brushed. Inside, we are desperate sandpaper,
 
breathless, the buttery lights of day sink into
dawn; two perfect halves of pink grapefruit,
skinned, twelve times crushed to velvet, lifted,
assumed to the inside flesh of new coconut.
 
A burning moon fossilizes, figs sway, right over
right, left dips left. Don’t fall, is what you whisper,
back to you, in your sleep. It’s too late to warn
the earth of the impression coming.
 
III
 
We wrap each other down, around, become
ground cover for every lonely night that ever was.
 
In the morning the monkeys come to eat what’s
left of us. Talk is of the great storm, long gone
now. The older one, the Bishop, who never stops
filling his jaws & covering his eyes, listens back,
 
for one last thunder squall of fruit he hopes will
fall. He wants one last floating midnight-note to
drop like nine miles of ripe banana down the back
of his throat. He wants return, homily, consecration.
 
What is it that shook the blood oranges & bread-
fruit from our every tree? What left the roads
reduced, impassable?
 
What assuaged the purple hills all night, all the way
to the tea blue sea, cooling the fruit floating there,
twister of raw sugar, cubed, then row after row, ginger,
grated, peeled, dried, tangling tango of tongues.

The Clitoris

is 9 cm deep
in the pelvis.
 
Most of it scrunched & hidden.
 
New studies show
the shy curl
to be longer
than the penis,
but like Africa,
the continent,
it is never drawn
to size.
 
Mapmakers, and others, who draw
important things for a living,
do not want us to know this.
 
In some females,
          the clitoris stretches,
          unfurls,
          8 in,
          with 2 to 3.5
          in, shaft free,
          outside the body.
 
          The longest clitoris of record
          has been found in the blue whale.
 
In water
desire can rise,
honor sea levels,
ignore land-locked
cartographers.

In water,
desire refuses retreat.
Picture
Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements. She is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze; Rice; The World Is Round; and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, is forthcoming in 2020 from TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.  https://nikkyfinney.net
Copyright © 2011 by Nikky Finney. Published 2011 by TriQuarterly  
Books/Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.