in equipoise...

If I were not afraid to fall into a dream
love would last as long as time
and past the edge over which
everything must fall;
when there is great accounting or simply
the end of all that ever was,
I want love that I've created
made with my life and will to endure;
to linger still like light
above horizon, an eternal midsummer night.

When a bridge between day and night
is never crossed, held in equipoise;
when sunset fills my lover's hair
and my eyes make worship upon her skin.

When she holds my face
like found treasure might not be real...
and she asks again and again
with fingertips and her soft, soft lips.

If not afraid
to wake so sadly and sudden,
I would fall into a dream.

On Sundays...

...she gives herself
sweetness of love and touch
from tedium of passing days, a pause
from shadows that came and stayed a while;

she loves

for its blinding beauty, in waters
that must flow--for the haunting urge
skin upon skin, she tastes lips and feels
lost in giving and taking, to moan her song
at one with walls that seem to tremble too;

in twined limbs and words that linger
so long as racing pulses throb; and as deeply
for it is Sunday,

she is an altar

to knees...

It has the feeling of falling through the floor,
a descent from obvious to subliminal,
by dreams that rise in smoke
cling to ceiling into an invisible fall
soaking into us, through skin into marrow,

where we breathe them within;
blend them into physical essence
perfecting thought into tissue--
to live as we live, die when we die--

and what of sorrows so deep as marrow
so intrinsic as blood and breath;
what of the sadness that descends
covers us as night: in endless boundless depths
where spirit flickers like last candle,
where only the love we have created
covers the raw state of existence.

When we are alone with empty hands,
hands that once held a child... what of life
when it becomes an empty space, airless
useless even to carry an echo...
What of the storm that never leaves us dry
whips us with painful hard rain

Once in childhood dreams, through a window
I saw Grandmother alone and cold
driven to knees by hard rain--Now

the dreamer-child
brought awake by rains, to knees;
lips move to wordless prayers,
knelt in hard rain
looking into an empty window.