The Lover the Beloved

The lover lowers her gaze and the Beloved
raises it

until lover is engulfed in oceans too vast to
circumscribe

and around their margins fly continuous bands of
singing birds

The lover closes her lips around silence the way
light enters a room and obliterates darkness

and the Beloved suddenly starts singing inside the
lover’s mouth until even the stars like wandering animals
in their constellational shifts bleat and bay across
vast astronomical distances making them as small

as the moisture bead on the lover’s lip and the
Beloved’s eye-gleam from as far away as
deep undersea

The lover stands to embrace the Beloved
and the Beloved stands to embrace the lover

And the lover stands to embrace the Beloved
and the Beloved stands to embrace the lover

and the echoes from their movements blow rainbow
lights stuttering against earth’s canyon walls and icebergs
break off and slide into black waters

And the Beloved stands and the lover
shrinks within the microscopic compass of all her
insignificant acts until each breath
obliterates her
and the Beloved stands to embrace the lover
until the whole world rises to a standing position within that embrace

An Ant gnaws at a redwood tree and it
falls in a straw across a single heartbeat

We’ve never left God’s glorious dimension and need only look

not within us nor around us
but through the sphere of that Glance the Beloved takes and
blows into a ball of sky and crashing waves

which is all the lover offers through the paucity of
her multifaceted “I”

The singular embrace

---

4/2/2005 (from Holiday from the Perfect Crime)

Categories: Poems