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.
