Tasting the Rival

Lyrics

I found your book on a basalt cliff. Fatu Hiva.
The pages were stiff with salt.
Inside, two worlds.
One was a white lab in Jaén.
The other was this body you wore.

Nine in the morning. The copa azul, the blue glass.
To judge the oil without the bias of color.
You wrote that down. Page three.
Swirl, sniff, aspirate.
A quick, violent slurp of air.
Searching for fusty, for muddy, for winey.
Rewarding the burn, the good Picual pepper-kick.
The olive biting back.
Thirty seconds. Spit. Cleanse the palate.
Another blue glass slides into your hand.

But on page after page, you confess the rival.
The ghost on your tongue.
Warm, yellow, forbidden.
How can you name what is true, Betty,
when your own mouth is haunted by butter?
How can you judge the green and the bitter
when you crave the soft and the sweet?
This body, this oil. This rival.

You were trained to reject the note of coconut.
The taste of Hojiblanca, over-ripe, gone soft.
You called it a failure of timing.
Here on the island, coconut is the milk, the water, the scent of the air.
Did you leave these pages here to surrender?
To let the red volcanic soil take the evidence?
To let the humidity un-write the straight lines of the lab?

Because on page after page, you confess the rival.
The ghost on your tongue.
Warm, yellow, forbidden.
How can you name what is true, Betty,
when your own mouth is haunted by butter?
How can you judge the green and the bitter
when you crave the soft and the sweet?
This body, this oil. This rival.

"August 1998," you wrote. "This waist is a failure of timing."
"March 2011. My skin is a rind."
I trace the words with my finger.
A life graded in a blue glass.
A body judged against a flavor you swore off.
Did you ever just once
let the butter melt on a piece of warm bread
and call it perfect?
Just perfect.

The book is closed now.
Here in my hands.
I can almost smell the guava in the air.
And the salt.
And something else. Faint.
The ghost of a craving.
Can you judge fairly?