Salt

March 28 2012

The way it pours

and  sounds.

Into my palm, cupped
free, dry, rustling.

A perfect mound

of white.

Each crystal exact,

melts into my sweat

nips my tongue

with briny sharpness,

a suggestion of blood.

From the sea, the sun.

Underground

from its crystal fortress.

I will eat rock

and die for water.

I will live forever

preserved in salt,

a desiccated stump

gnarled, hard.

I will bite my love

mingle sweat and blood,

season her lightly

with my tongue.

I will add a pinch,

lick her down

and up.

I will pepper and zest

pickle and cure,

dissolve with her

in lust.


I could have called this poem Salt of the Earth. Because that’s how salt seems:  stable, basic, earthy.

There is no narrative, or even sequence, here. It’s more a stream-of-consciousness piece on this confounding and contradictory substance.

Because salt is all contradiction. It’s a rock, yet we eat it. Too much will kill, as dehydration kills. Yet it is necessary for life, and also preserves. Salt is universal, from the salinity of all the world’s oceans, to the salinity of our blood. But it also has the particularity of terroire, since unprocessed salt carries the trace contaminants of its origin. It is ubiquitous and cheap; but before geological salt was discovered, it could only be obtained by evaporation, which made it rare and expensive; so much so that it shares its Latin root with “salary”.

We sweat salt, and taste it in all our bodily secretions. And so it adds spice in more than the literal sense:  because salt is the taste of sex. But it also makes language coarse, and wounds scream.