The Way to Love, Like the Sea

There is no other way of loving but the way I love you:
Unreservedly, with loud voices, with laughing;
With arms flung wide to encompass the oceans
And then to circle back ‘round to touch together the fingers;
And thus to encircle the world
And every love and every laugh
And to hand it over in a spectacular upheaval
As an eternal gift to the beloved one.
It is the way of all loves, the way
Of a little girl flinging her arms ‘round the neck of a stranger
And saying is a voice as petit as her frame: “Ah!”, the way
Of a broken woman who flings her body ‘round another strange body
And cries out in passion she does not understand: “My love!”, the way
The dying lover buries her lover and flings her spindly arms ‘round the casket that closes him
And announces to his open grave: “My life, I love you!”
It is the way of the poets who express
But have not the words to do their expressing;
It is the way of a doctor or a lawyer forsakes their work
And lies down beside his woman
And sighs in a contentment that dislodges the day
Of every misery and unlovely disaster.
It is unutterable, and so I scream syllables to the silent surf;
It is uknowable, and so I close my eyes to my pounding veins;
It is untouchable, untasteable, nonsensical,
And so I fling my arms wide to it, swim in the sea of it,
Scream in the absurdity and in the fury.
It is the depths of peace, the love of loving you.
It is the look of longing in my eyes as I think of your large eyes,
Sparkling like sunrise over all the oceans
That I offer you, gathering them into my arms,
Encircled by my deep, by my sea, by my soft silent surf.
There is no other way of loving but the way I love you.

Light

If I am a lighthouse,
Are you the storm or the sea?
Are we two constants, you and me?:
One tall tower of light shining
And one deep swell
Moving moving against me.
Or are we two separate, one from the other?:
You a passing frenzy, a stacatto dance
And me that same tall tower of shining light.

Or am I the tower, tall and empty,
White and charming to photograph,
My face turned upwards to the sea;

While you are the pillar of light that is in me
That comes vaguely and brightly
To light up the sea upon which
I turn my wide eyes?

Adaptability

Happiness is your arm's length
And the width of your large hands
And the density of your smiles.
It is the light of your hair turned gray,
It is our moments together,
And the moments compose our years
And our laugh lines and gray hairs.

Happiness is my flowered gown
And the yellow of the sun
Under which we lay in the solemn quiet
Of our vows.

Happiness is the quietness of our glances,
The gazes we know,
The anger and penitence,
The sorrow and the moments unending.

Happiness is the devotion of our knotted hearts
Tied in inextricable bands
Stronger than gold or death.

Untitled

Yours is the song I hear inside me, a prayer:
Your voice is the cry of many saints,
Your lines are the words of all poets.
The song blows through me like wind to lift my head,
And I feel in it all the warmth of your summer breath,
Your breath of grasses and wildflowers and breeze.
The song echoes like hymns sung in giant, solemn cathedrals
And like chants flung across open fields
Surrounding great monasteries on ancient mountains.
It calls down from the hillsides in me,
Casts itself in surrender over my seas,
And rises and falls in symphonies through my valleys and vales,
And I chase it along the path that it travels.
It thrills me like eternity and echoes along its length--
It is pleasant and soft; it is hope,
And it fills me.

Angeles

I looked the city in the eyes.
I saw a squalor started there,
Undending through the ages, old as wind,
And ripping through the startled streets.
From where I stood upon the pinnacle,
I saw every set of eyes and
Every secret pain there living;
And I saw the angels like bright flashes,
Saw the angels gliding silently,
Saw the angels with upturned faces.
They were weeping, and so I wept.

I traveled through the streets to know them all,
And I felt in my insides a split of pain.
In each set of eyes that I knew,
I saw poverty and poetry and joy and good striving;
I saw the desperations involved in living;
I saw the languid infusions of light;
And in each was the gentlest reflection
Of the angels gliding gently over.
And each eye was weeping, and so I wept.

I met an angel, and her hair was dark and long.
She smiled at me with brimming eyes.
We did not speak, for our tongues knew separate worlds:
She spoke with the tongues of angels,
And I spoke with the tongues of men.
But our eyes shone together in a glimmering haste,
And we understood our eyes in the moments we had.
"Here," she said with her bright laughing eyes.
"No there," I said aloud, but she shook
Her head and touched my chest,
And I shook and split open.

From my belly, split, I saw all my heart,
In pieces tiny as the smallest seeds:
Saw them spill over the city
And thud solemnly to the earth,
Where they sprouted up like great trees.
I saw them spill over
The heads of the people,
Saw them land on the rooftops,
Saw them land in the great rivers
And swim downstream.

And then I saw them, caught up
In a great hushing rushing wind
And scatter across to the edges of the earth:
Saw them land in great laughs in tiny villages,
Whose starving people gathered them up like scraps of bread;
Saw them strike the oceans in great splashes
That made the cooling waves crack against the steaming shore.

And the angel spoke, and I understood her:
"Go," she said, "Collect each piece;
Find each shard; grasp each bit;
For here," she said, and touched my open chest,
"Is all life's mysterious good."

And we looked at each other,
Her bright eyes filling my eyes.
They were weeping, and so I wept.
They were laughing, and so I laughed.
She was dancing, and so I danced.

To A Potted Plant Outside My Window

A Sonnet
You bloom at mid-day, petals soft, exposed
To elemental changes in the sky:
A bird alights upon you, from you flies,
And then alights again. The noons expose
And beckon you to open in transposed
And brilliant symphony. The rain denies
You not your entrance to the grand reprise
Of day; it only grants you brief repose.

And to these all, oh flower of mid-day light,
You open in exotic scents of noon,
You open in your pleasure and delight;

But every evening close again, too soon
To see my transformation in the night:
To one who looks so very like the moon.

To My Potted Plant, in His Nakedness
I walked out onto the back porch this morning
and there you were just sitting there naked
and your flowers were strewn about you the flowers
I so admired just an afternoon before.

I was caught by surprise because I suspected
that your flowers would just keep blooming and
that they would take over the back yard until
I would not be able to see the world for you.

I glanced down at the flowers dead wilted
in the light of a new morning and wondered
in what universe would a flower
I saw the day before in lavender now be brown.

I wondered at your nakedness, your nakedness,
your utter lack of propriety you should cover up
your nakedness and take a lesson in decency because
I was just so surprised to find you sitting naked in your pottery.

I suggest to myself that the new purple flowers
mean new life or they mean the death of the old or they
mean a transition to something better but
I can't seem to see them for the dead ones littering my porch.


And Upon Your Fallen Petals
And upon your petals lies a look
Of utter shock that such a fate
Should befall you, you with your
Beauties unfolding in midday.
The shock is in their translucent
Shell, is in their clear brown
Muddy stream color, is in their
Sense of grief at being now unlovely.
You just bend against the wind
And wind yourself up toward
The midday sun that brought you
Life. Upon your new buds you
Shower your attentions,
And upon your petals, fallen,
You may once or twice raise
A pitying glance. But past
Is past, you say with a smile,
Purple and green glimmering
Up at the sun. Past is past.

On Disfigurement

The boy, eight, looks up with bright eyes shining,
Shining for his father's eyes,
Electrified by the same deep chasms of earth-toned eyes.
Mirrored and mirrored and on into eternity,
They stare, and they shine.

There is a hole where his cheek should be,
And his father's eyes, wet with intensity,
A deep fire burning in the bottomless chasm,
Run over and over the contour of flesh.
The boy grins: The lines of his lips fold up
To the left and end abruptly to the right.

He will have surgery, and then he will be beautiful.
That is what the doctors say.
He will have the surgery, and all his beauties--
The myriad subtleties of the shining eyes,
The line of his abrupt and constant smiles--
Will remain intact.

And his father tucks him in
Beneath a blanket with the letters of the alphabet.
The father points to the A (by his right cheek)
And down to the Z (down by his leftest toe)
And says, "I love you from here to here."

And says, "Are you scared?"
(The boy trembles underneath the blanket of letters
And the blanket of his father's hands spread across him.
The boy shakes his head, "No.")
And says, "It will be hard at times."
(The boy trembles, a shining tear cresting over
The great peak of his lid, caressing his contours).
And says, "We don't have to go through with it."
(The boy stops abruptly and smiles.
"Yes. We do.")

His father takes his child's face in his
Large, large hands,
And says, "I love you from here to here."
And he kisses his son on the left cheek,
Perfectly shaped and smiling just like all others,
And he kisses his son on the right cheek,
Where the contour glistens with a tear and is beautiful.