Inanna Returns to Dumuzi
 
She says:
The words left unspoken, formless, as all best words are,
I wanted to say “The ancient word ‘desire’ means ‘the heat of a lover’s tongue,’” but just as every year, the first time, I am afraid, afraid you will not understand.
 
Dumuzi did not understand that first time, either, encountering her
on the riverbank under the Huluppu tree, naked, proud in the fullness
of her new-found fertility, stroking herself, awakening.
 
Dumuzi thinks of the steppes, the hours of loneliness tending the herd,
when one’s mind is free to wander… What of the internal, the life imagined? It might as well be rendered only on the musty scrolls of imported papyrus, not hard-fired clay.
 
She says:
Remember how you cut down the Huluppu tree?
From its wood you crafted our first bed.
 
Dumuzi nods.
 
Inanna says:
Remember how my favorite tree always appears dead, even
though it is so full of desire that, before it can be cut down
for firewood, its lust bursts forth through the ruptured bark,
all along the trunk and not just the branches?
 
Dumuzi thinks… But she forgets. She talks. Every year it is my spirit which redeems her from the underworld and her sister Death’s house, yet somehow she thinks talking helps.
 
And she says:
I bring forth flowers in the same way, nodes of fertility in
my skin, the earth.
 
Dumuzi, wise Dumuzi, listens, thinks…this dialogue enjoys a fragrance which is not earned, an allure like the scent of unknown flowers.
every year a different perfume
This is like the earth of the steppe, rich and ripe.
There is nothing she will not do.
 
Her dark-eyed desire flows like her father-god’s semen-river, E-u-phra-tes deeply, a current which, even now, he knows he will find, in the end,
undeniable, irresistible.
 
Each time she stretches her arms across the bed, like a rower among
The marshes of the delta, lifting the oars free of the grass and weeds,
And says, “I need, I need,” he gives in. 

Jamie Brown
415 Federal Street,
Milton, DE 19968