An Essay on Milk

(For Mehrhoff)

We eat & are eaten & the grain riots with each November's turn.
Trembling stars tickle the black plum & all the stock on the farm.
Gogol's pig matter-of-factly snarfed up a stumbling chick
Feeding in the black mud morning on the Russian steppe.

Raw or cooked was always the question: Homer's tapestries of
Winespill & roasts, ships launched on the hermetic hour,
Orange Masai drinking bloodmilk & e-coli on the dry Kenyan flat.
Faults grind this tropic down an unnamable woman's thigh,

Where the kiawe sheds another arm we learn bread
Plucked by ache of mouth open for kiss, a chunk of day on an
Archipelago launched from secret mantle plumes,
Cooling to sprout beds of tender fern, lichen patches

& therein an aphid of infinite burning.
Emperor atolls subside, their ore eaten by the bulging Gyre
Only eight cells of mine were never replaced & they are hungry,
Demand a minute each hour, crave seared flesh & a piece of ass.

The honu swim further west each epoch seeking familiar metallic scent.
Yesterday the television burped that the earth is speeding up
& the world has taken more slant a spin.
No mele to put us at ease while "microbes make war in our kidneys."

The shriek of a pre-dawn thrush
Parked on a dead snag opens the stoma of a million leaves--
& the day begins with a cry that wants buoyantly
this wedding in our glow.












Clint Frakes lives and writes on Oahu and currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, where he just completed his Ph.D in English with emphasis in Creative Writing. He has published poetry and prose in American small presses for twenty years and has just finished his first full collection of poems, The Edible Myth. He is the former editor of Big Rain and Hawaii Review. Recent Work has appeared in Tinfish, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Hawaii Review. He has work forthcoming in Bamboo Ridge and Nexus.






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