The Baobab Tree 1995

The sun will not leave
you alone. Day after day it comes to stare
with its drying eye, pinpoints its beam

on the trunk of your larynx, fixates
on the flower of your voice, the fruit
of your phrase. Today you are

so hoarse and the burnt look
of the skin beneath your neck scalds
my own. I’ve come to join you here,

mother, in this desert-
on this hot and grassy plain, our bodies seared
above the ground. Above the ground

you are so pleasing to the bats that circle
at night-so many seeds still left
in your mealy pulp. How you thrust

your ropey arms upwards into the immobile air,
trying and trying to get along
with that seething, unreachable tumor.