February 06, 2018

The Path Made Plain

From Finite (c) 2002



The poem that can be written
            is not the eternal poem—
the lover singled out
            not the eternal love.
The unspoken poem is the urge
            toward creation—
the lover but the originator
            of ten-thousand lovers.

Unfettered to the poem—
            unattached to the lover—
one senses manifestations of divinity.
The hidden—the unhidden
            co-mingling in darkness,
                        in spirit’s fog and storms.
The pathway is plain in the flesh.

                        *
I will not name my lover.

Naming binds him to motive threads of air,
            binds him through tongue and ear.
If I do not name him, still, he is bound
            by the O through this snake    
                        of cunt to belly to throat.
Pleasure confirms mortality.

I write knowing ink will fade,
            paper wither and dust.
I love, not possessing the lover.
            Tasks never reach completion.
This is the path.

                        *
If I form this poem into the shape of the lover
            too much is unsaid:
the lover a deformed caricature:
            arms missing, a leg, the nose too long,
                        the penis, though admired, too small.

This lover, this genesis of all lovers
            cannot be paper bound.
He is too vital to read the same way twice.

In the insistence of poetry we become loveless.
                        *
I do not regret the pleasure
            the repetitive pleasures
                        the plateaus the building
toward higher pleasure I do not regret
            the pleasure that the lover
                        who is not the eternal lover
            stoked like tiny flames
the lover that engorged my belly
the lover that satiated me
until I was without language
                        and swam deep in my underbelly.
The lover who defines and defies mortality
            through pleasure.

This first lover             of ten thousand lovers,
the lover who is not the embodiment of eternal love
I do not regret his malicious words,
nor do I regret that this lover leaves.

                        *
Yet,
If a valley of water
            is the spring of the earth         
                        and is likened to the Mother of all Creation
and if the Mother of all Creation
            is mirrored in the face of all women
                        and if all women bearing children
            call their cunts holy, what then, lover?
You do me dis-service
            when you depart
                        and leave my cunt untouched.

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