On the Subject of the Navel
Very little has been written
on the subject of the navel.
Holy books
and histories ignore it
to their shame.
Great works of literature
are less great
for their silence on the matter,
and with scarcely
a cursory paragraph
devoted to its news
the thickest textbooks
of anatomy know less
than simple lovers.
Fine by the bellybutton,
furtive as a serval.
When a summer noon
interrogates it
in a poolside beach chair
(mutely, but at length),
it beads a teensy
drop of sweat
as though it guards a scandal.
Which it does.
Confidant of smudged
redactions, second cousin
to the censor’s bleep,
it’s earned a blank diploma
from the College of Oblivion
where every question’s
solved with zero, false,
or none of the above.
It’s one of Nowhere’s
diplomatic attachés, a spy.
Versed on the absence
that came before each of us,
it understands nothing
better than anyone.
How to plumb
those unfathomable shallows?
How to work loose
that impossible knot?
Like any scar that grows up
to be beautiful,
my beloved’s flinches
from attention. It shies
when I reach toward it
unless first I coax a smile.
You’re the smallest
cultivar of tulip, I say,
in whose tiny pearl-pink bloom
could sleep a single
amber honeybee.
I lay a finger at its rim
and promise: I will only purse
my lips against this empty
doll-size shot glass when I’m finished
with sobriety forever.
On and on like that.
Eventually, she’s willing
and I cautiously lean in,
offering my ear
as to a wire and tin can
telephone. On the other end:
static, then the conch
shell’s version of ocean,
a black hole mumbling
from its hammock of stars,
and gray moths in spider skeins
sighing and sighing.
A thrill to overhear
the fluent vacancies conversing,
but finally, like music,
the void defies transcription.
No one sees through it,
not even this bit we each
wear in our hulls
like an open porthole.
Of course our libraries
are dumb. We’ll never
decipher the sentence
an omphalos ends, mile
on mile of illegible angel graffiti
scrawled in the darkest
alleys of the womb. Yet maybe
it wouldn’t be worthless
to look very hard
at this soft punctuation
and attempt to resolve
its tone: not, perhaps, the last
dot of ellipsis, but the point
of a vast exclamation.
