My neighbor grow heavy and beautiful

Emily Vizzo             

I.

Be the bulldozer that buried
itself, that made loud pointless sounds until the diesel spent.
Know that whatever you dig out
remains the same size as the hole. 
Be the best engine, the fruitless digger that could.
My inaccurate seeker. My dear mouthful.
All big rocks become small rocks, & worms win.
But large things can contain small things & just the opposite is true.
Let’s argue that I’m belted in my perch,
though a bulldozer does not know how to find small things.
It asks of the ground only large questions.

Dear auto-pilot, my push-button gearshift,
my perfect circle of padded rubber tread. There is scalability in a dug ditch.
I am what they call “an operator.” The load-bearing sand.
I am a specific type of catch. 
Who would want a machine in their mouth?
A bulldozer can harvest another bulldozer, but only by mutual accord.
Machines fight machines. I know better than to build you. 

II. 

Best bulldozer. You said there was nowhere to dig.
You might have argued that I was false real estate. Though I wanted
to find you in the earth, two bulldozers cannot be friends. My animal,
I did not hunt you with my marvelous intellect. I did not say come
without reason.

III. 

Something can fill
you, like a cup. The ungenerous pour. The body count.
If you are the same size as your beautiful
hands, allow me to wrap myself in them. The bassline so big my lungs
jump raw like fish. Cursive can be uncurled. The harp unstrung
I have no bullets to speak of. 
The word elucidate.
My animal, I believed you with my body. Here the flex, 
the fuck. And love may be the swinging bag.

IV.

And I may be the syringe that bites you with my single tooth.
The tricks belong to the tricks.
The day is just too big, so I break it into bites.
But what likely matters most is my endangered body,
grounding itself in the fresh white cake.
Let’s say I wanted something easy. But what would that be?
Death sometimes seems the best rest.
What I fear in myself is not my death but my love of falling.
Light loves anything although you could say the same for the dark.

Emily Vizzo is the author of Giantess (YesYes Books). A National Geographic Educator and former Artist in Residence with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, she was a recent panelist at the Nobel Prize Teacher Summit in Stockholm, Sweden and is translating from Italian. She serves on the Executive Committee in Santa Barbara for the Surfrider Foundation to help protect the coastline and ocean for California’s Central Coast. Her free, public science and creative writing workshops received a 2018 Coastal Fund grant through the University of California, Santa Barbara. Emily's work has been noted in Best American Essays and Best New Poets.