Elizabeth Robinson
On Savor
It stopped snowing and salt
lofted slowly from some version of the heavens.
We’ve failed to recognize
that our subject was salt, that the blue of heaven
is also the preservative, salt, that clings
overhead in a realm that, but for its saline and cloud,
might be pink. Or any other
of a number of colors.
We can resume when they taste it.
(We can thus resume.)
Failures of recognition, once recognized,
continue to pelt down.
Salt recognizes the body as some form
of heaven, and then it
surges forward from its self.
The subject, resumed, stiffens on the skin.
(We believed
or rather, we perspired.)
Thus it
cures us:
belief, better
than a preservative, as it
dissolves,
and like
gravity,
absorbs the subject to any hue.
We believed that to be so absorbed added savor. Belief, crystallizing
and then dissolving again, makes its journey from
above, back down or into the subject.
(The itch of what falls or dries to the surface makes itself
known on the tongue.)
Is belief anything more than what it tastes of itself?
Pink, brown, blue, etc.
Or is it like the organ of an imaginary body or weather condition:
precipitate or sweating,
their flavor of conjunction.
Elizabeth Robinson is the Hugo Fellow at the University of Montana for 2012 and 2013. She is the author, most recently, of Three Novels from Omnidawn. Counterpart will be published by Ahsahta Press later this year.