THIS LOVE
This love is not stooping to anybody
not even to the loved one
nor is it sipping itself into a cup
never tipping over if not to overflow,
this love is not sliding down,
is not emptying spaces,
it defies any attempt to bind it,
like a snake it snaps back at those who admonish it
this love knows only the sound of the bee and the dove
in that language it will be sung or spoken
it will seize and be seized...
a buzzing that is a son and a poem,
a quick and savage death,
a daughter and a season,
a breaking of bread and a menstruating whale,
miles of mapped madness and millimeters of meta logic
a desire so pure and loved
that it will not be assuaged
a wound so open and sore
that it will be guarded as a secret
or a benediction
a sleepless night looking for words
a walk at dawn finding them
the gift of eternity for chewing on the right ones
a lifetime ending with no regrets
This love eats roses- thorns and all-
sometimes the delectable Ambrosia of the Gods,
sometimes the black salt of witchcraft
sometimes the bitter sweet nothingness
of an abandonment as cruel as the light dimmed entryway
where it was consumed
this love feeds on wind and tears
and the incalculable exhilaration
that its friction propels.
It is an arrogant love,
it is selfish and self absorbed,
it wears peacocks feathers and mantillas,
a belt of colts and arrows
and an arresting beauty enlivening all who look upon it.
Then lost to itself its breath all encompassing and its compass
it is reduced to a humble beggar,
as the Christ who climbed the cross,
and as that Christ it turns spiteful at a moments notice,
and looking beneath it sibilates:
it is against you that I die, I loathe you so
This loves lives in letters hidden from the loved one,
it rusts in a ring dug from the bottomless sea,
it unveils in the devastatingly ravaged latitude of silence
from where the name of the loved one is whispered
from where the name of the loved one is howled
It tortures in the promise of one solitary touch,
It betrays in the infinite wait for its object of desire
when Gods and benevolent saints
are all forsaking and forsaken,
are all dead,
this love is lived, hidden, rusted, unveiled, tortured and betrayed
Sometimes it sings a ballad to its loved one
sometimes to itself;
forgetful of the loved one it recognizes it not
and of itself it lives,
of its own delirium
it sleeps and awakes
in the bed made and unmade for love making and wrestling,
for dilating monsters
waging wars of loneliness beneath it
birds of peace and bells of revenge on it
through the bodies consuming each other
and the agony of having to get up from it
This love moves heavens, heavens move it,
its feet, sometimes spiritual and unbound,
cover whole centuries of patient splendor;
sometimes, brutal and unyielding,
rush through the dust a minute of despair.
It knows no light or dark
neither empty nor full
no chain neither rhapsody nor the sigh of resignation
this loves shouts like the crow at dawn
it calls the faithful to the altar that it burns down to ashes
and the hopeless to the ground in which it sows seeds of liberation
this love knows no time nor wait
this love dies of itself
before reemerging
to kill the lover and the loved one,
this love laughs at you and I and dances its own war,
tars, melts and re-tars its ways,
nourishes its orange grove back to an endless spring,
devours its own flesh, empties its tomb,
slays the dragon from the entrails out
kneading his body his lips and his tongues of fire
into a loaf of resurrection that it gnaws at without respite,
this love is tireless and merciless
it drinks its lake of dark, heavy waters
spits out its lies, hides its resolution
against you and I and the lover and the loved one
and against the wife, the husband and the wise
when the wife and the husband are the betrayed ones
and the wise the onlooker
carrying forth the righteous advice,
it ridicules all common sense and lucidity
it shatters all ideas and sensible surroundings
all stations of uncertainty and morality
like a bomb blasting through across and beyond the heart.
Yet one day it awakes into the heart of the loved one
and becomes malleable and gentle
as the breeze through which it braids the lovers hair,
as the cupped hands from which it drinks
and it quenches the thirst
as the whisper in which the loved one calls its name
and it answers with its own
and Gods and saints all thicken like honey on its fingers
and this love sucks them and it is amazed
at how all seems reasonable and orderly
trembling as a starred sky through tears of gratitude
and in its plenitude it sheds its skin
leaving behind only the silvery glowing tail
coiling around the lovers breath
and resounding anew
anew vibrating
anew re-birthing
untouched