baby joy,
fragile as a sunbeam
i almost missed you
why do you whisper when you command
why do you startle with your sunkiss when you remind
with the scent of a rose
with the lifting of shit from shoulders
you laugh like a little river, like the little hills
and ask to dance in grey times
like their cornfields
to dance out grey times
to waltz with light
laughing singing
crazy joy
pulsing blood through every cold thing
changing form
saying, crying
i am all the leaping
i am the drinking, praising, fucking
i am the flesh, the blood
the blessed come
and all the life

every valley has not been exalted
and the hills still need to be
made low so that i can look over
them and see the glory i stopped
believing love is lukewarm and
affection damp at best and these
damn folks don't try their best
from one look, one gaze, all i
see is half life
and still, in my life,
out of the corners
in the stable, in the cave.
so quietly, so quietly,
hear him crying,
the little child is born
all these days, all these travels
have stretched tiresome and long
but past lies, deceptions,
half attempts, i hear the angels' song

in the cave of quiet i know now
with something like light laughing
something like the pleasure of air
that it was you, after all, that i
followed
even when i thought i'd left
good thing it doesn't take me forty years
to learn a mirage from a promised land
i have been, in this moment,
fortunate enough to land my body
in a good place
to know that the good touch,
the little whisper
the respite from fear
has always been your lover's hand
the gentle touch, the loving thrust
i trust
was always you

today
i am not young enough to
be trusting
i still believe the worst of people
for the simple, grownup reasons
that the worst is what i've seen
i still worry about my bread
though i can't turn it black
or white
i am still addicted to
sophistication
it is like a scab
i can't stop twisting
scratching, wanting
and it is depressing
gradually
in tears and blistered
stupid feet we are stumbling toward
the wheatfield of bliss
and infinite rest
to breathe, to throw those dirty clothes off
under the sun
we become children
for now we're not completely free
but you have to take the first step.

I remember one leg in the east
another in the infinite west
and you thrusting through my mississippi
or my nile or my euphrates
threatening to break me with the force of
your sex
with the youth of your sex
and the power of that thing called love
it was an autumn
and this in winter
late december cold
heated when i remember the shine of your face
and the gloss of your face
and the sweat all on your face,
down your eternal body
paused in the illusion of its
middle at the small of your back
relaxed, sighing
that day i was like the goddess enthroned
enthroning
and you were, shaking
quaking
coming,
coming home

red beard
I feared never
to touch something as soft as that roughness
as cool as the heat of your breath,
as eagle eyes through glasses looking
down on me when I begged you to ride me
and you did it like the Mississippi you
did it just like jesus walking on water,
sailing on waters of come and leave and
stay and good-god and goddamnment in our bed,
the bed that will always be ours after
you stained it with the knowledge of you
after you cracked yourself like a paradise
fruit all over it, and I cannot get the stain out.
In every fiber, every little thread,
you are still there,
erasing old lovers and making way for newer loves

I am still remembering the white geography,
the procelain country of your skin.
I never saw such milk before,
poured out all across the bed,
poured out in the form of long limbs
lain across me, stretched over comforter and pillow,
hot with life and desire and the place,
black as the pit,
where you stored your sex,
red sex,
pink sex,
rising out of vulcan blackness,
out of hair darker,
curlier than mine and
your mouth on mine, and your rough hands, unlotioned,
forgotten, untendered, calloused with music running
over me, a ragged softness, the softness of mouths
demanded, the softness
of the surprise entry into me.
Surely that was the strangest country,
surely your coming into me, my coming
into you, the gasp, the pour, the heat,
the liquid heat, the honey of a man was the miracle.
You know I journeyed through monasteries
and all the way to lourdes for a miracle,
good lord, I found it here with you, in you, pulsing.