you are
an unimaginable light,
the tongue I swallow
and the surge of you is swallowed down
and the white hands come, unfurl
come, little light to the greater whiteness
how I love you, how I have felt your fire
beaming uncontrollably in my ribcage
blossoming and swelling in my throat:
you are a thousand white moonflowers
I have to bite ****** my own lips to keep down.

and to be filled with your white light is
to shudder, like in a lover's embrace,
and you, God, is the name spat out,
a thousand thousand years in the making
and a thousand flowers swallowed down,
and how can I keep your glory closed in
when you wind me into a ball of light?

oh, but I am sick, I could curl up and die,
so strong and so violent is your love
and shivers race and tremble bright
down my spinal cord;
rip out my spinal cord, HaShem
and twist it in a polished white
spiked circle:
the beauty of a snake
devouring herhisits own tail.

Adonai, Adonai, light of our life
I swallow your beauty down.

I don't understand anything save for
the wonder at how you could exist,
how like living petals your skin is,
how like the violent tide of spring you are,
how anything in this world could be so bright
and how even in sunlight you were a better Bat'sheba
than me, with the river of your hair baptizing me,
and I've never talked theology, not once in all my life
because I'd never felt the need to shake and shiver in the sun,
and I'd never trembled with the violence of any deity
until I'd knelt to you.

have you seen Eurydice
and did she kiss you with gold on her tongue,
and when she bit your lips like a ripe-bruised fruit
did you taste the metal-black sheen of your blood?
and when you rowed her down the river did
her white chemise trail, unblackened, through the mud?
and if she kissed you, I don't blame her;
the Holy Ghost receives her subjects, penitents, lovers
with all the love in her wilder heart,
so tell me, brother Charon,
have you seen Eurydice?
I'd hoped she'd be in the river-weeds,
drawn down to the water from her faery meads.

sacred fire that tears the flesh from my bones
blowing the whispers of little flowers
into glass beads the color of the heart of the spring-blown rose,
and I am only the half-hearted silkscreen copy
of the portrait of some Roman *****
until it's realized a woman is never an only,
and when I know the slippery pink petals of your spring-blown rose
I know the heart of God, and in love, love, I trust.

more than anything, I want
to sit by your feet again;
I want to hear the harsh and bitter birds
of Goethe's words flutter from your mouth again,
and the white eider-down softness
of your cotton slip brush against my skin,
burning me with the feel of you
for I think I've found the heart of me lives
with the heart of you

when I walk in strangers' flower-beds in my sleep
flowers which redly rush out
fervent flush of poppies, poppies
that lulled me back to sleep on a starless Sunday morning
when your sheets were white as poetry, white
as my arms' pallor and bowers of perfumed magnolia flowers
and pale as the poems I wrote next to you
before the sun glowed, the I and the you
and the middle word I will not write, writing blind
because to lose the poems that came to me
in the fading Byzantiums of my dreams
is like falling out of love,
          falling,
                  out of each-other's lives,
                                       out of love,
                                       (love, love.)

and I wake up, with flowers still in my eyes
and I will never lose the pink roses growing through my eyes
even as I no longer am Candide a-sitting at your feet,
because any world where someone like you could've bloomed
is the best of all possible worlds.

I can never save you and I am terrible with
golden-haired girls with penchants for
shiver-shiver-shudder-lightning,
right through their bloodstreams
and I am a creature of ink and adrenaline
and that is all my bloodstreams have in them
and I can never save you and I can
only say I love you
and how many love-love-love-yous
can you devour before you feel content?