When dinner becomes a dance,
Standing in the kitchen as the clock strikes 12,
Tomato juice dripping to my elbows
Spices spilled over vegetables raw in my hands,
The carving knife wet with sauce
Eating fistfuls of my own hunger and joy
Until I reach the end of that deep and driving primal hole
The meat pads my bones
And fills my aching soul
.
And standing for midnight mass
In the holiest place in my home
I catch my glance in the window's gleam
And am introduced to a woman I've only met
In my deepest and sweetest of dreams

Your Name rests on my tongue
with the same weight

  As the immense anticipatory pause between each breath;

  Between filling my being and being left empty as death

I feel the change in season
Like the catch of breath in my throat
Like dancers with sweat hot on their skin,
Like the subtle softening from heat to sin

A Copse of trees stand tight
Huddled like frightened beasts against the cold of night,
Wild wolves in the wind snapping at their
bonelike limbs
The hunger of cold, biting and old
Thrum out like the very first hymns

The stars linger this morning,

Caught frozen between grass blades

Uneager to relinquish the long night,

They shimmer brilliantly in the golden morning light

The line of confused winter birds
Wash across the crisp blue sky
As the breaking line of a wave against the shore,
Pushing on, morning song
Flying as high as the day is long

The morning unfolds itself like a poem
First, a softening,
- realisation of cold -
And then,
        the promise of gold