Sealed
by Natalie Shapero
The manmade biosphere was sold at cost
today, the planned savanna’s crinkly plants
punched and tagged. I’m lost
in this dark wood
four-poster, wondering: could
a brand-new biome possibly supplant
its monolithic elders? Love, we can’t
go quiet, as our systems do in sleep.
We can’t partition off our ruined realms
from the panoramic sweep
of consciousness.
The earthy, blithe redress
of those eight neo-greenhorns overwhelms
me now; they medicated slippery elms
and infused rhizobia in clover roots
beneath bright skies of high-performance glass.
Their insulated suits,
advanced degrees,
their stellar indices
for good cholesterol and body mass:
the cleanliness is gorgeous, gone. We pass
a dull shame back and forth, find it rejected
as a corroded organ: chargeless, capped,
a fern someone neglected
to repot.
Geodes with peridot
hearts, we burn and scar and overlap
our layers in a topographic map,
encroaching on ourselves like caves that cut
their ice incisors early on. Basalt
blood in hard pools. What
could have possessed
you, head on my rain stick chest,
to love me? Every vein a hairline fault,
I shudder with their secrets and their salt.
Natalie Shapero is the author of No Object (Saturnalia Books, 2013), and her poems have appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, Poetry, The Progressive and elsewhere. She writes and teaches at Kenyon College, where she is a Kenyon Review Fellow.