Spring has come, true and real:

3 May 2015

3

Other-Wise Love

The huge, wet, soft music rained down on us ceaselessly; sleep was disrupted where limbs would embrace.
I cannot understand how I was first made to bless myself, then the next mirror-borne face,
and then—someone else. I’m a ghost in a pattern of blankets my own people never once wove.
Now I am sworn to a new magic answer where threads are inwoven with—other-wise love.

Am I a living soul wrought for reception of endless night-magic as songs fall like rain?
Am I the one sense that old solemn trees leak like tears, making flowers that leave a red stain?
Am I the one you’ll still want when you wake up tomorrow, and all this old world’s fallen off?
We might not walk hand-in-hand, though the seas rise and swell, then subside. Let your underhand cough—

and catch the next shy, fallow answer. I’m dreaming outside my own window. Rise up like the Sun,
and let me know—While my love’s dreaming the answer, he’ll only just spare me the dream he’s begun
to let leak on either side, morning and midnight, as new dawnings claim a sweet reason to wake.
Maybe he’s shy, wet, and sad, but he’s already woken to know how much love he can make,

and we are the women who’ve always held out our first arms to embrace a man good as the grave.
He’s not a babe out of every least heaven; he’s a good spirit who’ll always behave—
like prayers in a whirlwind, a silo, a temple—where many grass blades give their all, then give way.
Music falls down here like rain through a memory love wants to summon through wave after grey,

grey wave of the oncoming magic of tides—beneath a low heaven that’s salt as the sea.
When I wake up in my dark, solemn chamber, eyes are alight, and they’re yours upon me.
Child of the ancientest, most sunlit marvel, child whose lorn soul is the source of my own,
when I wake up in the moment of truest true sunrise, your soul will be what makes mine moan.

Other-Wise, and Glad to Be Alive–
your J