Musk is a scent derived from a deer gland
that resembles a human scrotum
and thousands of years ago, in Sanskrit,

This vast meandering flat-bottomed gully
much smaller than a valley, with a hump
of rock spined all its length is home to—what,

Those three angels,
Know everything about me.
They assist at the cycle of each day’s creation:

I wake at night and pace
the length of my digestive tract
to where the path obscures

We stood, in health class, around the cow’s heart
Miss Hutchings unwrapped on her desk. Inside
And out, she said, we need to know ourselves,

In the handed-down writings of Pliny.
In Herodotus; in Aristotle.
In da Vinci, who fears The Flood’s return

The banana is an herb, she said, but
The Koran claims it’s the forbidden fruit.
The orange is a berry. Grapefruit is new.

We wrote for Miss Price. We made voices
that weren’t ours for three full pages:
the old, the immigrants, Negroes, Jews.

Pink moon jelly, brown-bulbed weed,
and the serial, busted-up lines of nudged lather:
hissing, provisional lace, so white