Alight
I stood before the effigy
As though I were the queen and the show was for me
While my innermost wilderness tugged itself free
Of the chains of the mind that bind it.
He said I’d know you by your cloak -
A bower sweet as a meadow oak.
I asked you to share it so I wouldn’t soak,
And you didn’t seem to mind it.
You folded me under your warm grey wing
And I fit like a song that I know how to sing
So I sang with my hands like a spring starling
To your bell without a ringer.
When the fire gave over to the storm
You found a place to keep me warm
Entangled around you and perched on your form,
On the proffer of your fingers.
Well, I might know you for a hundred years
Or this might dissolve in a raft of tears
Or this might be the last time I see you, my dear,
But I’ll keep this memory with me:
Your tree-trunk legs and your velvet hands
And your footprints there in the Bali sand
And the open fist that your truth demands
And the way your looking lifts me.
Face warm as a mug between my palms,
Rooibos-sweet and sunrise-calm
And your outbreath, bright as lemon-balm,
And your ocean heart slow-dancing.
How lucky your river, every day;
How I melt to be moved in your rag-doll way
Held aloft on stopwatch DNA
With my tickled inhales prancing.
This is where the good stuff is
Where intimacy loves to live
Where give is take and take is give
Tell me: do you see me?
I stand before you, wings unfurled -
A quantam, wild, half-homesick girl.
There’s so much to taste in this banquet world
When the wine of now flows freely.
