Returning from a Marvelous Journey

NEXT LIFE SERIES copy

I’ve got a window up my sleeve
and a door in my shirt
I can open any time to walk
out into the blue. Arch my
arm and see
meadows, sunbursts, vistas.
Pantaloons of mileage, shoes of market silver,
windy hair from lunar rocky mountaintops
shagging this way and that
like a semaphore signaling which
road to come in on, which
circuitous loop to take to the
interior.

All this from being in the Land of Marvelous Vision,
Place of Collapsing Mirrors,
the spiral staircase from heaven to earth
down which, in diaphanous gowns of mist,
come tall ladies of supernatural beauty
with cats’ eyes and lips of lapis lazuli.

I saw a blind man pick up a crystal
and see through it to the
ends of the earth.

I saw a protean bird change shape a
hundred times and end up a
small boy with red shovel
standing in sand.

My beloved’s eyes put a second moon in orbit,
my beloved’s lips send shivers across Jupiter’s hills,
my beloved’s heartbeats drumming rhythms in
Pluto’s clouds balance on sharp mountaintops before
scudding off into

shadowy territories.

1/23/96 (from Miracle Songs for the Millennium)

Categories: Poems