“The Return” and “Meditations” (poems)

The Return

Because you look into their eyes and see them turn their eyes away;
because they are afraid to touch you.
Because for generation after generation,
you have called each other lover, kin—yet, still this,
and because of this—

you go out, breathless, to the hills,
                                        stare a long while at the stars, 

            and they take you, oh yes, they take you, hoisting you 
            effortlessly, pressing you close to the wild night.

A hawk comes, circling an inscription, dedicating himself.
He circles slowly, knowing how hard it is for one of your kind
to accept pure generosity.  A deer, her ears alert as any lover’s body,
looks straight at you, and you are startled to see yourself in her gaze.

Slowly a smile, unbidden, spreads, reaching beyond the contours of your face, 
weaving into the aroma of trees; and you murmur: 
I am loved.

            And a moment later: I love.

And you who for hours, days, years were driven down,
scattered like ash by fears of all who curse the dark and any kind of
mystery,                                               who put you out…out! 

You speak the ineffable password now,
letting yourself in

            to the only, real world.

At first you do not want to return to the house, 
frozen on the side of the road. But, finally, you do. 
For they… they are waiting. 
And you… you have something to say.

Meditations

                                                           1.                                                

I have loved you since the beginning,
waiting all your life to love you more

and saying such, Death offers himself up—
his tarnished odor, silver gaze, immense.

Don’t be afraid, he implores, you are breaking my heart.

In the wash of such longing,
all dread drains out.

It happens such. It is that easy.

                                                           2.

Afternoon walk.
Dead squirrel on his back.
Rigor mortis has set his tiny hands clawing the clouds.
I look at him long, and later think of him
outlined against the brittle earth and flowering sky.

                                    (…and why else if not to ravish the stars?)

                                                         3.

Tonight, slight winds
knit my hair into all my dead loves.
Quantum waves overlapping, even as they did

when side by side on city streets, in living rooms by starlight
water, we—a rampage of passion and palaver—were becoming
                                    each other’s occasion for being.
The force of our intensity
                                    collapses the quantum wave.
Our task: to love each other into flesh.

                                                       4.

Immense darkness
            slit by terrifying
                         intaglios of light.
                                    Everything unleashed!
                                             (shuddering/begetting/shuddering/begetting/awe/ full/ becoming)

                                                5.

In apricot light, the sea salt-cold, and this
            this once-only house on the bluff,
once-only wood, glass   this once-only kiss of wind
            gull feathers swept through a porch of clouds
once-only torso recedes  into a bougainvillea rush

and here, see how a single champagne bird
            relinquishes her hold on the narrow branch–
                        origami wings, perfectly bent for beauty

               an ouroboros of cloud/mouth opens in speech: 

          What are we if not the dreamer, the dream, the dreaming?

Editor’s Note: The collage featured above was created and provided to us by Steven Cline, for use in our Creature Consciousness series. His phantasmagorical work can be found at stevenclineart.com.