struck, then new

i was struck by the girl whose
visage and whose posture and
whose offered smells were
so violent and so severe
that i forgot everything
about how to behave.

(behave! that terrible
and vexing word that
rinsed from my pores
the real dirt of Truth
and left me so much
dead in youth!)

i was at once, in her
presence, sent back to the
nocturnal leaves of autumn,
to the merciless stations of
deep spring, to the sharp
silver patter of summer rains.

true love hides her engines,
submerged as they ought to
be in a fabric woven with
sincerity, enlightenment,
and the ticklish threads of
amber-dried moonlight.

you don't know love if you can 

put a book to it, you can hum it 

in your head,  if you can decipher 

its glyphs as if chiseled in your 

native tongue on stone-behind-glass.

how i tried to forget her!
how i touched my tongues
to the psalms of hidden angels
so that i might be cleansed of
the taste she left in my
newly vented heart.

i would swear, before i'd met
her, that love was the work of
learnéd hands and not some
primitive magic conjured in
the nighttime of man's minor
chambers.

but she had set loose her continent
of native warriors to my front,
over-running my blood; it was
too late for this dumb body,
who discovered one day that
he'd been soul-marked for good.

it was not her soft-focus
kiss, let's be clear; or
the shy weight of her
hand to my nape, or
the crowning breath upon my
cheek when she smiled.

or the exact breast,
or the enfolded vulva,
or the coy buttocks,
or the obedient thigh,
or the eyes the depth
of a thousand rumors.

it is something you are
struck by, as the
felled tree hammers the
floor and reduces all
things to an exclamation,
then a question, then
a parenthetical.

thus far i've only wondered
from my own arm's distance,
from my own deep chapters,
the meaning of the word,
inscribed as it is with the
hot hand of divine fortune.

never again will i attempt

a run at fate like i did

the day she first stood before

me, talking about the

hum of the winds during

the climax of star-showers.

the old obedience that comes

with age is most vulnerable

in these encounters, and

i'm fixed upon the notion 

that they are as rare as gems 

found in the pockets of fools.

i might search for it -

in fact i have - only to be

put out on my ear into

the cold harbor where

all the other derelict ships

founder on their sides.

i've learned that the splendor 

of a melding union is a gift 

offered when all the cosmos

say yes to you and to it and 

oblivion can be glimpsed in a gesture.

and her gesture was ripe with the

aura of something primitive,

profuse in its boundless calling

and governed by the smallest of

particles that collided with one

another into a frenetic climax of tranquility.

to be loved in such a way

is to be boiled down to the 

bones and resurrected anew,

simple cell by simple cell,

until the heart beats outside

the chest and the blood runs bare.

it's not supposed to be comfortable,

this percussive union; it's not supposed

to lay you down into beds of grace. it's

supposed to prickle and burn and delight

in making you feel in every fiber

the epic expulsion of life's beginning.

i see now, years later,

what she did there:

it was all in her grand

narrative to sketch me

into a pageant of life

secured by her gifts,

to be elevated at once and

for all above the clouds of

the mundane and the grieved,

above the debased attitudes

of simple men, to know that 

life should be life with a lush view.

she enrolled me in joy with

her clever hope-song lyric, securing 

in me a vision of the

stealing vistas of what could

possibly emerge if i chose

to cross her elegant transom.

in recent times i've fallen

out of favor with my own

wonder, stumbling on the

roots of negation, collective

fears and bottomless cups.

love is not a thing of the 

wright, who manufactures

from his hand the great

ongoing war between

life and art, who sweats

upon the chisel and brush.

rather, love is an irreplaceable

exuberance of kisses upon

the brow of a man's narrow

horizon - it exists in and is

consumed by the loyal plunge

into life's unanswerable questions.

it is an inimitable transcendence

upward to her self-ness, to her

embracing desires, within

which you gain an offering

of her spectral flesh, so long

as you keep your eyes closed.

i understand nothing about

your own love, your own

shadowy passions, your own

tumult of faded aggression

toward intercourse  

with a him or a her.

i only know that i was

once, years ago now, an ordinary

creature full of the dire

foils of man, and that

when she came upon me

it was with a new breath,

a new countenance,  a new
flavor to the tongue, a new
pressure to the skin, a new
convention of faith, a new
torrent of vitality, a new
fine excuse for being me.