Listen, she says.

I’m listening, I answer

and kiss her chin.

Obviously, you’re not, she says.

I kiss her nose and both of her eyes.

I can do more than one thing at a time,

I tell her. Trust me.

I kiss her cheeks.

You’ve heard of planting lotuses in a fire, she says.

You’ve heard of sifting gold from sand.

You know

perfumed flesh, in anklets, and spirit, unadorned,

take turns at lead and follow,

one in action and repose.

I kiss her neck and behind her ear.

But there are things you need reminded of, she says.

So remind me, Love, I say.

There are stories we tell ourselves, she says.

There are stories we tell others.

Then there’s the sum

of our hours

death will render legible.

I unfasten the top button of her blouse

and nibble her throat with more kisses.

Go on, I say, I’m listening.

You better be, she says,

You’ll be tested.

I undo her second,

her third, fourth, and last buttons quickly,

and then lean in

to kiss her collarbone.

She says, The world

is a story that keeps beginning.

In it, you have lived severally disguised:

bright ash, dark ash, mirror, moon;

a child waking in the night to hear the thunder;

a traveler stopping to ask the way home.

And there’s still

the butterfly’s night sea-journey to consider.

She says,

There are dreams we dream alone.

There are dreams we dream with others.

Then there’s the lilac’s secret

life of fire, of God

accomplished in the realm

of change and desire.

Pushing my hand away from her breast,

she keeps talking.

Alone, you dream in several colors: Blue,

wishing, and following the river.

In company, you dream in several others:

The time you don’t have.

The time left over.

And the time it takes.

Your lamp has a triple wick:

remembering, questioning, and sheltering

made of your heart’s and mind’s agreement.

With it, you navigate the two seas: Day

with everything inside it;

night and all that’s missing.

Meanwhile, I encounter difficulty

with her skirt knot, her fingers

confounding my progress,

as she goes on reviewing the doubtful points.

There are words we say in the dark.

There are words we speak in the light.

And sometimes they’re the same words.

From where I’ve been sitting beside her,

I drop to one knee before her.

There’s the word we give

to another.

There’s the word we keep

with ourselves.

And sometimes they’re the same word.

I slip one hand inside her blouse

and find her naked waist.

My other hand cradles her bare foot

from which her sandal has fallen.

A word has many lives.

Quarry, the word is game, unpronounceable.

Pursuant, the word is judge, pronouncing sentence.

Affliction, the word is a thorn, chastising.

I nudge her blouse open with my nose

and kiss her breastbone.

The initiating word

embarks, fixed between sighted wings, and

said, says, saying, none are the bird,

each just moments of the flying.

Doubling back, the word is infinite.

We circle ourselves,

the fruit rots in time,

and we’re just passengers of our voices,

a bird in one ear crying, Two!

There are two worlds!

A bird in the other ear urging, Through!

Be through with this world and that world!

Her blouse lapses around her shoulders,

and I bend lower

to kiss her navel.

There are voices that wake us in the morning, she says.

There are voices that keep us up all night.

I lift my face and look into her eyes. I tell her,

The voices I follow

to my heart’s shut house say,

A member of the late

and wounded light enjoined to praise,

each attends a song that keeps leaving.

Now, I’m fondling her breasts

and kissing them. Now,

I’m biting her nipples.

Not meaning to hurt her,

I’m hurting her a little,

and for these infractions I receive

the gentlest tugs at my ear.

She says,

All night, the lovers ask, Do you love me?

Over and over, the manifold beloved answers,

I love you.     Back and forth,

merging, parting, folding, spending,

the lovers’ voices

and the voices of the beloved

are the ocean’s legion scaling earth’s black bell,

their bright crested foam

the rudimentary beginnings

of bridges and wings, the dream of flying,

and the yearning to cross over.

Now, I’m licking her armpit. I’m inhaling

its bitter herbal fumes and savoring

its flavor of woodsmoke.   I’ve undone

the knot to her skirt.

Bodies have circled bodies

from the beginning, she says,

but the voices of lovers

are Creation’s most recent flowers, mere buds

of fire nodding on their stalks.

In love, we see

God burns hidden, turning

inside everything that turns.

And everything turns. Everything

is burning.

But all burning is not the same.

Some fires kindle freedom.

Some fires consolidate your bondage.

Do you know the difference?

I tell her, I want you to cup your breasts

in both of your hands

and offer them to me.

I want you to make them wholly

available to me.

I want to be granted open liberty

to leave many tiny

petal-shaped bruises,

like little kisses, all over you.

One and one is one, she says,

Bare shineth in bare.

Think, she says, of the seabirds

we watched at dawn

wheeling between that double blue

above and below them.

Defined by the gravity they defy,

they’re the radiant shadows of what they resist,

and their turns and arcs in air

that will never remember them

are smiles on the face of the upper abyss.

Their flying makes

our inner spaciousness visible,

even habitable, restoring us

to infinity, we beings of non-being,

each so recent a creature,

and only lately spirits

learning how to love.

Shrill, their winged hungers

fill the attic blue

and signal our nagging jeopardy:

Death’s bias, the slope

of our lives’ every minute.

I want to hear you utter

the sharpest little cries of tortured bliss,

I say, like a slapped whelp spurt

exquisite gasps of delighted pleasure.

But true lovers know, she says,

hunger vacant of love is a confusion,

spoiling and squandering

such fruit love’s presence wins.

The harvest proves the vine

and the hearts of the ones who tend it.

Everything else is gossip,

guessing at love’s taste.

The menace of the abyss will be subdued, I say,

when I extort from you the most lovely cries

and quivering whispered pleas

and confused appeals of, Stop, and, More, and, Harder.

To love, she says. For nothing.

What birds, at home in their sky,

have dared more?

What circus performer,

the tent above him, the net below,

has risked so much?   What thinker, what singer,

both trading for immortality?

Nothing saves him who’s never loved.

No world is safe in that one’s keeping.

I know you more than I know, she says.

My body, astonished, answers to your body

without me telling it to.

She says, I want you to touch me

as if you want to know me,

not arouse me.

She says, We are travelers among other travelers

in an outpost by the sea.

We meet in transit, strange to each other,

like birds of passage between a country and a country,

and suffering from the same affliction of sleeplessness,

we find each other in the night

while others sleep.   And between

the languages you speak and the several I remember,

we convene at the one we have in common,

a language neither of us were born to.

And we talk. We talk with our voices,

and we talk with our bodies.

And behind what we say,

the ocean’s dark shoulders rise and fall all night,

the planet’s massive wings ebbing and surging.

I tell her, Our voices shelter each other,

figures in a dream of refuge

and sanctuary.

Therefore, she says,

designations of North, South, East, and West,

Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall,

first son, second son, first daughter, second daughter,

change, but should correspond

to a current picture of the sky.

Each of our days fulfills

the measures of the sanctum

and its great tables’ rounds.

The tables are not round.

Or, not only round. At every corner,

opposites emerge, and you meet yourself.

I bow my head

and raise her foot to my mouth.

The pillared tables make a tower and a ladder.

They constitute the throne and the crown.

The crown is not for your

head.  The throne is not your seat.

The days on which the tables stand

will be weighed and named.

And the days are not days.

Not the way you might understand days.

The tables summon the feast

and are an aspect of the host.

The smell of her foot

makes me think of saddles.

I lick her instep. I kiss her toes. I kiss her ankle.

Don’t you kiss my lips

with that mouth, she says.

Gold bit, I think. Tender spur, I think.

I kiss her calves.   I kiss her knees.

I kiss the insides of her thighs.

I’m thinking about her hip bones. I’m tonguing

the crease where her thigh and her belly meet.

The rounds enclose the dance,

she says.

The round and the square together

determine the dimensions of the ark, she says.

The water is rising as we speak.

Call everyone to the feast.

The smell of her body

mixes with her perfume and makes me woozy.

All being tends toward fire, I say.

All being tends toward fire,

sayeth the fire, she says, correcting me.

All being tends toward water, sayeth the water,

Light, sayeth the light.

Wings, sayeth the birds.

Voice, sayeth the voiceless.

I tell myself,

Give up guessing, give up

these frightened gestures of a stooped heart.

I think, Inside her is the safest place

to be.  Inside her, with all those other mysteries,

those looming immensities:

god, time, death, childhood.

Are you paying attention? she says,

This is important.

One and one is two.

You and me are three.  A long arithmetic

no temporal hand reckons

rules galaxies and ants, exact

and exacting.  Lovers obey,

sometimes contradicting human account.

I’m drooling along her ribs.

I’m smacking my lips and tongue to better taste

her mossy, nutty, buttery, acrid sweat.

Listen, she says,

There’s one more thing.

Regarding the fires, there are two.

But I’m thinking,

My hands know things my eyes can’t see.

My eyes see things my hands can’t hold.

I’m telling myself,

Left and right grow wiser in the same house.

Listen, she says,

Never let the fires go out.

The paler, the hotter.

But I’m thinking, Pale alcove.

I’m thinking, My heart ripens with news

the rest of me waits to hear.

Are you listening?

But I’m not listening.

I’m thinking,

A nest of eggs for my crown, please. 

And for my cushion, my weight in grapes.

I’m thinking, In one light,

love might look like siege.

In another light, rescue

might look like danger.

She says, The seeds of fire are ours to mother.

The dust, the shavings,

and all spare materials

must be burned in both fires,

the visible and the invisible.

Even the nails burned in them.

Even the tools burned.

And then the oven dismantled and burned.

Have you been hearing me? It’s too late

for presidents. It’s too late for flags.

It’s too late

for movie stars and the profit economy.

The war is on.

If love doesn’t prevail,

who wants to live in this world?

Are you listening?

You thought my body was a tree

in which lived a bird.   But now, can you see

flocks alive in this blazing foliage?

Blue throngs, green multitudes, and pale congregations.

And each member flits from branch to living branch.

Each is singing at different amplitudes and frequencies.

Each is speaking secrets that will ripen into sentence.

And their voices fan my fragrant smoldering.

Disclosing the indestructible body of law.

Ratifying ancient covenants. Establishing new cities.

And their notes time the budding

of your own flowering.

Die now.  And climb up into this burning.