byGloria Bird
- I awaken in the shadowed morning of early winter
within the yearning of unseasonal rain,
thoughts of you peering from the edge of a dim
cave. The question is, will you come down,
will you bend before a woman
who dreams your tongue buried in the spread
eagled heart of love? Today I am unreasonable
and need driven, sweetheart,
please forgive me.When the musky scent rises from heated body,
I know it is the rhythm of love's desperation
that sears us apart, and that only the body's
affirmation can pull the broken pieces
back together again. And that for me,
I say, only your soft words can soothe
the frenzy of my new salt sickness.
Then it happens. You materialize
in the wasted room, cover me like skin.
Oh, baby, this is the end of the reasoning
world, a psychic break, and the thousand
rigid miles between sense and losing it
for good mean nothing.The ancestral desert memory flows
in your veins where small things must be
scratched from the surface of cracked earth.
Mine is mountainous timberland
overrun with wildlife. Together, we must
find safe ground from both famine
and profusion, build our house
of balance in the tilted world
where even the smoldering fragments
will burn red in the eye of God.
Previously unpublished.