Disciple
       

You eat Utah,
literal salt of the earth,
briny efflorescence of an ancient shoreline.
Eat the rust-iron pink and shimmer-silver,
the turquoise and sulfur-yellow encrusting
the ruptured bedrock
you walked across in summer sun.

Your sweat as it rose up to evaporate
tasted on your lip
exactly like that vast millennial sea.

Deep in winter's early dark,
you crave that brackish life,
no slap-dash dash and sprinkle,
but appetites immersed in tart salinity.
Salt infuses every form—the gumbo's roux,
the simplest of Sunday eggs,
homemade oatmeal cookies' savory sass.
Nothing pure or cautious here in this house.
You cook by finger and touch, tonguing
and eyeing and hefting.

You would sift your very self down into buttery grease,
into the rise and mellow swell of dough,
the way you gave yourself up to the wilderness,
wishing you could enter Zion's desert rock,
your raw, redeemed life
boiled down to dry blood, erupted
minerals stunned in the blue-hard sunlight.

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Copyright © 2018 Susan O'Dell Underwood All rights reserved
from The Book of Awe
Iris Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission