Apricot

A summer Taos sunset in your hand.
The weight of a small child’s fist,
a girl, resisting sleep
as she sleeps.
The shape of a chicken angel’s egg.
Eros’s lovely clefted backside
in velvet. Fleshy
as a horse’s lazy, lower lip.
A faraway fragrance:
juniper in gin, that slow gin
kiss.
What God saw on the eighth day, and ate, and said of it —
way good.
The woody stone we worry-gnaw when death’s near,
when we’re toothless again as babies,
trying to keep a great thought
small.

Deborah Slicer’s collection of poems, The White Calf Kicks, won the 2003 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She teaches at the University of Montana.