Interlude
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBiFxpcws4U] A Bengali prince with gold turban went up to the top of the palace tower …
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