I recall your eyes as the sky looking back at me

loosed from its cage
my heart sails on the high    hot thermal
of my soul
into your sky-eyes
into the blue and away from my life
toward my Life

I am phoenix    arising
from the ashy embers of what was
into the future what-is
carried on flights of feathers
into

the sky looking back at me


c. 2017 Roberta Compton Rainwater

To S.B./T.H.

it matters not where you meet St. Gabriel
whether on earth or in heaven    for
writ large on a person’s soul is a deepening
an aging
an inevitable annunciation that your casket of buried
fears and joylessness
is being dug by the gravedigger   an ancient
angelic presence   who keeps you safe
that you may hear the annunciation of your worthiness
to serve Love
that your immaculate conceptions are beloved
of Love
that you are the hands and imagination
of Love
and that the poetry of your life
is a chrism
an anointing     by Love,
                        for Love, and
                        in Love



c. 2017 Roberta Compton Rainwater

comes a time to turn   to put the feet of the heart
forward    step at a time   each foot shod in time lessness
and space lessness

comes a space to hold    to place the hands of the soul
around    the body’s tabernacle    each hand soothed and
soothing

comes a view to see    to cast the eyes of the being
beyond    the mind’s walls    built by No without
Know ingness

comes a time to cluster these     in courage and trust
to move away    from the air lessness of shallow being
Toward

to step off the craig    onto Love



c. 2017 Roberta Compton Rainwater

cloud cover thickens this emotional porridge
realizing distant leagues between letters
written on vistas vast and open prairie
with piled stones of a fettered heart

your silence bespeaks these iconic symbols
atmospheric visions, while I stay rooted
a fantasy and sage brush cumulonimbus
in Nazca Lines, shared love, lives muted

how many years and weathered months
as careless rivulets move each grain
and mountains crumble to their sea mounts
with moist remembrances of loss retained

-cec

like Jericho of the ancients
my walls have found their matchmate, their shofar,
their holy crumbling disintegration -
have sounded the depth
of my abyssal and penetrable, vaginal soul

I am entered through the desolated and tender crevasse
discovered in the arched vault of my love
which treasures not, nor needs
yet knows ee cummings’ “secret of begin” to the outer
borders of my being, the hidden places of my knowing

the right kind of madness, this
of a rightness and a madness so pure, it stings
the perceptions of ordinariness and
makes of ennui - the sinter of a heated being -
anything but

yet, enter my fornix with dread and awe
lest you vitrify it by atomic waves of sorrow
I am fragile, and tender, gentle, strong and destructive
I am death from Life
and
Life from Death

blow your shofar, Ram, and I shall fall into your gravity
I shall be as Callisto to Jupiter,
an orbit by seduction and a
child wombed in Love


c. 2017 Roberta Compton Rainwater

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