1
I’ve seen many goddesses born
but none as finespun as you, my Venus:
for if
existing were an art form, you would be the moon
enlightening me in all her silver beadwork and mystique.

2
At night, I see my beloved again
and find her body captured by the seafoam:
it’s only a reflection,
a silver phantasm dancing on the ghastly waves,
but I adore the sheen of her face in the sea.

3
I’ve seen many goddesses consumed
by the very passion that I feel for your soul:
for the moon
is only the shadow of her full being,
and yet I still drown myself in her light.

I taste wine on your lips as we kiss
and make love—my heart is heady
—drunk on you and the sweet drink
that incinerates our maddened lips
and pulls me closer to your trembling.
Hours pass in a dusk darkened chamber,
my mind coated in the two syllables of your name:
Are you still drunk, my love?
Only on you.
Afterwards, when we lay intertwined,
I forget the separation of our two bodies
and imagine our souls interlocked
like the wing of a moth against a flame.

Stung by the bee, wild in what I thought was love
my heart saturated in venom, oozing out fruitless hopes
of keeping you close—despite the burning poison—
I tried to fight for your love
like love was meant to be a conquest,
a battle for your cold affection
and not a sanctuary.

I loved her so,
she who fell for me
with the wild grace of a falling leaf
captured by autumn winds.
I loved her wildness
and felt that,
as long as I chased her,
I would remain exhilarated.
Chase I did, until my legs grew heavy
and it was she who fell
to the ground,
her brittle stem exhausted,
crumbling in my hand.
Who knew that I was the wind—
all along?

I hold you ever so close, to hear your heartbeat
against the hollow that is my own.

With the shutters closed and your eyes bright
in the darkness that encloses us securely,
I tell you in a whisper about my first heartbreak.

How did it go? you ask and stroke my hip;
I was a flower, I tell her, and my lover left me unwatered
to the extent that my once-pink blossoms became gray,
and the head drooped as if pinned down—

Her hand stops on my knee.
So,
why did you keep loving her?

—Because, even as I withered, I kept staring at the sky,
memorizing every drop of rain that fell, hoping it would shower.

You don’t fear love now?

I pull her in, warm against my chest, my aphrodite.
No, my love, for when I found you, it was like an April storm.

Her figure in my bed
relaxes, half obscured by silk sheets;
there’s a sweetness to her uncovered form,
not in a way that is ****** or arousing,
but for how it speaks of comfort in my presence
like we are so adapted to each other
that nothing is strange or foreign to us—
even the vulnerability of nakedness.

And like a goddess, she pulls me in to her chest,
a whisper of soft and beautiful flesh;
there, I imagine us as once born from the ocean,
with pearl strewn hearts and wanton eyes,
as goddess meets goddess among seafoam and silk.

It’s a January night:
we are walking down windswept streets
with windswept hair adorned with white jewels,
carried into the night as if spellbound;
so, what do I do when you tuck my hand in
the crook of your arm? I walk with you that way,
in the dark of the forest at midnight, a coffee in
my right hand and my left tangled with you.

We throw our coffees into the night, and laugh;
what a terrible thing to do! — the poor forest! —
but there’s a brief high when we realize no one else
is awake but us in this lonely forest, no one to yell,
no one to criticize how I press my lips in the crook of
your neck and whisper sweet promises in your reddened ear
in the deep shadow of an oak tree crystalized by snow.

For a small infinity, we carry on walking, saying nothing,
the deep silence of the midnight forest swallowing us whole.
Windswept, two small universes exist in our minds;
yet, in these two universes the same song is imagined
again and again, without the other knowing—if only we knew
then that our love was reflective—if only we knew then:

How beautiful you were that January night,
windswept like the snow.