Letters to Adonis
I am a hungry fish
Diving into words
Expansive as seas of wheat.
This bread gives us life –
We have to catch it!
-----
With consciousness we fell
Yellow in the grass,
Soon to dry and curl
As dust sucked up
The knotted root, up
The trunk to uncurl
Blooming on the branch
Clutched by white birds,
And nearest to the sun.
A temple entered through
The forehead, fish swimming in
Beams of glass – these are my dreams.
Dreams or reality,
As if we have to choose or ask.
As if you forgot your grandmother
Was once a loud and desperate lover,
Or wished she did not remember.
Poetry is etched in nothing less
Than stones loud with love and desperate.
Here we may stop living our minds
Inside our bodies alone.
Rules have reasons,
Eternity has time for neither.
-----
I smell defeat in gridlock
And wet asphalt.
The iron mountains and their machinations
Have no end, other than their own destruction.
Our words set angry fires
And cut great blocks of stone.
If we accept history’s end
Then she will write our names
Into oblivion.
I broke the water’s glass
Like walking through mirrors
Never to look back.
(That is the paper taste of history,
A gem left uncut and buried.)
I choose the bird who ate her cage
And flies over waves to die.
Freedom is the eye that sets fire
To needs and mortality.
It is the taste of cherries
Freshly recovered
It is the sandals and pen
That laugh between
Maps of time and dying.
I write for maps like
Lanterns in desire’s storm.
My tongue flies with white birds
Over seas black to the hurricane’s eye –
It is there I was born
It is there that I died.
-----
I want the arc of the sky as much
As I need a stitch of the needle.
Look!
At the storm’s center
A pillar of silence rises to the sky.
We go there, waiting for love
And words.
It is just as they said –
A ripple describes
The love of wings for air,
Water that turns a wheel
In the earth rich with life.
I am born over waves,
Stitched into visions of death
And horizons of fire.
Do not forget –
Your child’s skin did not shed
Off like a snake or snail’s shell –
You fed your flesh to itself
And you grew,
Everything you were
Is still within you.
Your marrow holds the child
Who holds your hand
Smiling down salvation as
Flesh falls like a soft snow
From your bones.
The first time I made love
Her body wrestled my mind
And won.
My mind broke
Like a flock of white birds
Over one body and two souls
Each breathing into the other
Only to exhale
Like an idea beyond language,
Language the seed sown
That opens and consumes itself.
The goal now is to write
Myself into irrelevance,
The words to become the trees
In fall, the bed unmade, the woman
Unclothed, the stream
That flows below the well.
Let words come,
not by speaking –
Let them fall open like
Fronds of the palm
Beyond the mind.
Wisdom thrives in wind and tide –
They guide and release magnificent force
Without striving –
No strong arm
No battering ram
No declaration on intent –
The earth revolves without question,
In silence, as the wave is greatest
In the quiet crush
Just before it breaks.
