There's a hum of a warning, cracks in the ice. A frailty. Perhaps even a chill. It's gonna
break. But if I hold my mouth just Right, if the trembling remains even of a whisper - perhaps it'll stay frozen. Maybe the ice will hold me quite
Still.
No, it isn't unadorned, what we cannot know, what we must keep out of reach.
Yet, all my life, I've been waiting for something that brushed my thoughts before I was born. Some days I imagined it would be a lucid bell, stinging my muddled heart. Some days a glove, cupped into a fuming fist that would thump me into clarity. And some days a perfect wing thrashing from nowhere, pounding my consciousness, sucking the air from my weary lungs, making me shudder and cry out
hungry,
hungry,
so hungry
I want to scurry towards your den and worm my soul into your featherbed and drink. I want this with a vengeance. To fury my way into your heart and burn, the way a Siren's call pierces an eastern sky with red red rage and the Phoenix rises, shakes her plume, and lifts, and looks back to her bed of ash, and loves again, taking everything in with the sky,
Everything.
You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth. You have said my name as prayer. Here where trees are planted by the water, I have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret. And your lips closed, barred and locked past all that love cannot say.
In the country where I go, where I live now, I shall not see the face of my friend. Nor your hair, the color of sun-drenched grasses. Together we shall not find the land on whose hills bend the new moon, or an air traversed of birds.
What have I thought of love? I have said, "It is beauty and sorrow." I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, splendor, as a wind out of old time.
But there is only the evening here, and the sound of willows now and again dipping their long oval leaves in water.
I rip boundless caves in the murky skies, reaching for you.
There, a map of voices, a warning of others who would come this way, an animal who has seen things, an invitation in the secret language of trees, sung in wild shapes by a child...where are you?
I wonder, what is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things between us.
I am evening heavy, yearning for your breath to lull my longings into sleep, and for it I would walk on my knees a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
I want to know your body once more, that warm wet warren where your tongue curls, and the tongue roused, slithering a chilled path to my secret.
I beg to know the pain of loving differently.
Perhaps we should sit in the dark. In the dark we could suggest and propose and request. In the dark we could not see who speaks.
I can't do it, you say
and it's killing me, but you thrive, you glow on a distant boundary like a neon raspberry. I say, the way towards each other is through our bodies. In them we are a river mouth. Outside of them is a letting of juices; inside a pathway, the possibility of touching. What we know is time, chopping us like an iron hoe, and it keeps us from meeting in this life, coming together, drawn together ~ the way a moth will come to the bedroom window in late September, beating and beating its wings against cold glass.
As a child I knew everything.
The spaces between your fingers; the hum you murmur in sleep; the tow-colored hair that glows against your underbelly.
As a child I knew everything.
When the burden of apples is so great, the branches split, and red drips into green grass. Your laughter behind the clouds, tasting of the fruit.
As a child I knew everything.
Your god pulsing through me, leaving me filled with passion for sky and hills. Your god is mine now. I am bound, one desire, one misplaced soul.
As a child I knew everything
Now it is forbidden.
You, delicious, in sheets I will never warm, have come to surprise me now. So you are here putting a thought in my head.
I know you. You are the boundless bird and will leave.
But can't I rise up and mingle? Can't I nuzzle against the life we shared on another tide and linger, fresh against the dancing solos in the grasses we parted, like goldenrod ready to bloom?
You are the boundless bird and have left
and I am only half in the mirror, thinking thoughts only half mine, aching for such sweet familiar tangling
and dying on your vine.
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