Melapona Maidens

by Jordan Burns

I hear there’s vanilla bean down in Mexico,

 a vining orchid mass of fat green tubes

 that bulge and twist like ear parts.

Vanilla planifola in dead words.

bean plants grow slow and specific – they take nine months,

like me, and then it’s April.

thick gold dust aches only for the Melipona bee, but who can wait for the one?

 a soul-mate is a risky thing.

people with dark hair and skin and lips

 don’t wait it out;

instead they know to hand-woo those

vanilla maidens. There are secrets:

a stem of grass to lift the flower flaps;

a tiny touch to coax the parts;

a modest eye to behold

the hug of pollen grains on swollen stigma – Careful, always careful.

then some beans are popped

open for the flavor in the syrup that leaks

onto harvest fingers – red-black, like deep-gut blood.

secrets don’t drip, they spill.

other beans are cured to fetch a better price: first they know to drop

the slender pods in pots of rolling boils.

the searing water kills any

vegetating flesh. Then they leave them

 outside, trapped inside

tight wool wraps for ten sun-burned days.

and they sweat and sweat –

like summer journeys in my desert home, on dry mesas,

when my heart beats secret fevers to my skin

 and I can’t escape the hot-cloud hanging from my head.

becoming is the same for everything.

they sweat until they’re ready. Now they smell like vanilla, and taste like it.

and, so their vanilla souls won’t rot,

 the people know to dry them in the white noon heat,

 until the long bean fingers grow

 raisin-dark and wrinkled,

 their secrets shrivel like shrunken heads,

and they clack like ropes when sold in black bunches.

I hear crops often fail,

for sometimes hands aren’t quick enough and visions are too big.

the seasons are tireless.

I don’t know vining bean forests,

 or Mexico sun,

 or Spanish, or the Melipona bee –

I’ll never have more

 than one native tongue.

but I hear bursting, and sweating, and shriveling –  

whispers loud and deep in my ear:

I must know a little vanilla language.

Comments

[Jonahh]

"becoming is the same for everything." I like this very much, everybody "must know a little vanilla language", right? There are great word images, I love the rhythm, it absolutely pulls me in! And of course, I like vanilla ;)

[Semaphore]

Such an appealing poem to the senses, and filled with such layered detail that everything becomes real. Wonderful.