a fiery lava pool is my heart
a lake of incandescence    bubbling
over my body    melting me to raw emotion
burying me in an *******    pyroclastic flow of feelings

Love has taken on meaning
has produced Life
messy     viscous    muddy    hot
writhing
Life
has given new depth to my volcanic soul
and driven temperatures
to icy    bottomless    chasms

under which is my fire    my heart’s hearth

a legion of ghosts crawls over my rim
an infantry of past experiences to
remind my heart
of a once-fought war on the field of my soul
on the Plains of Love
in the chapel of my body

my heart pours its lavic gift over
my rim
leaving nothing of them to recall
or bring forward
or sound retreat
for
they are not memories anymore
they are echoes of echoes of echoes    disappeared
neither inchoate nor fully realized
gone


c. 2017 Roberta Compton Rainwater

Love will grow in me sideways, a supine pine
sapling, shoveling mountainous glaciers of stone

embedded into my boiling erosions, melting
the anaerobic hot mud into a calmer froth.

We may kiss at the precipice of the abyss
our love has inevitably chewed through itself.  

And I will likely palm our weathers
into a river-swallowing sea

and you will hate me; desert of a future
companion’s ship—can I

swallow my dominance; that devotion
could bloom from this love’s wilderness,

foresting in perennial fullness,
prospering in the shared bed
rock we have carved into orchids.  

At the place where I will bury my bones
in the murderous entrancement of another,

taiga could storm from the soft ring of fire
between twenty interlocked evergreen fingers.

All things are a present to be unwrapped
and unwrapped again

a book within its cover
a seed within the fruit

a ghost within its skin
a heart within a voice.