Ruth L. Schwartz

“Hieroglyphics on a Branch of Peach

Once, a woman made love to me
through the slippery dark.
Her brother was dying, her sisters were shooting
heroin in the bathroom as she moved her tongue
like sadness on my skin, and I felt
how all the sweet explosions,
summer, orgasm, a ripe peach in the mouth,
connect unfailingly to the barren fields.

What we have learned about love in this life
can never be removed from us.
Not one minute pried
from any of the days --
and yet, there was a worm
which entered the live branch,

lived and ate and tunneled through
the wooden heart, and with its body wrote
new language
through the lost years.

So there must be another,
more convincing name for innocence,
the kind the body never lost,
the grace of stumbling
through an open door.”
― Ruth L. Schwartz, Singular Bodies