to friend

my elegant, pastoral find;
my storied discovery
among the leaves of the
naked:

how truth may thunder
in the temples
when one stumbles
upon your smoothed stone.

the bloodroot of eternity
resides within the
finding of you and
spreads to all corners.

with some, it just comes
as naturally as the
orbit of the moons
around their mothers

and you fall up to
a fine grace together
to make the joining of
two lonesome nobles,

in a quest toward
the inner organs of
faith and kinship that
surpasses mere association.

when it comes -
truly arrives -
there becomes a
vital new luster

to the old star
rebirthed by the
collision of two
dreamy atoms.

how? how can it
be that a voltage,
vast in its
sovereignty,

be so captured
in a fleeting moment,
be so sent and received
in such precision but

with such dizzy
randomness, that all
of the universe would
have to be complicit?

hearts live in a chilled
world most of the
time, occupying
a firmament of ice,

making such a union
a deep, heated,
cosmic rapture of
fidelity to aimlessness.

we harbor subterranean
hopes and wants,
wishing against the wind
that we get what we pray for,

but a conjoining of souls
who've before danced
alone is the beginning
of divine symmetry.

you eat the words they
give you. you lick
the flavors of their
passion from cups.

you thick-and-thin
hold in contempt
the acrobatics of all
the fools you've suffered.

you lie together in
sweet foliage, breathing
in the sky and her
lovers.

you echo in darkness
all their utterances,
all their gestures, all
their looks in the eye.

you kindle, you enmesh,
you enthread, you
finger the top of
their lamentable reef.

you give them out
and prise open their
heads with your
softest teeth.

you forgive the mark
on the skin that
bears the name
of certain enemies.

you have a new
latitude of snow
and wind that sketches
across the gloom.

you banquet together
at a feast of
teeming stars and
hapless demi-moons.

you know what
knowing means
and shed all
expectations of gravity.

the sacred mother-child
comes to mind when
considering such a
trembling, quiet freedom.

how it is to be
at once a passage to
relic love and the
modern face.

to have this in its
wholeness is to
carry the empire on
one's heart-brow

and see oneself afresh.