MEET ME

Meet me where the rivers

never cross their legs

and the starwells entwine like snakes;

and the trees pin notes from the light

like leaves to a bulletin board,

and the sun is a blemish

of impoverished fire compared

to the mystic dark

that floods the far fields within

with the fragrance of the moon

as it makes lilies of the clouds

and sacred lakes of the two of us

realizing each other in the shining.

And don’t take off the world

when you come,

bring your shadows

and the rubble of your smashed masks,

and the dictionary of scars

you’re trying to translate

into a dead language,

and the silver snail paths

of the necklaces you wear like ripples of heartwood,

and the black bells

that ripen in the night

like the eyes of guardian dragons

and the shadow of the knife

that always points to you like north,

and I will bring my meteors and shipwrecks,

and the sorrows of my rain-sodden books

glued shut like eyelids and onions

and the broken yarrow sticks

of my thresholds and horizons

and the seed of the island I keep

in the locket of my skull

to carry into the next world

like a bird beyond its wings,

and we will make a bed on the wind like deer

and devote ourselves

to roseate oblivions of blood

that would make the orchards of the angels envious

of the roar of our imperfections

giving birth to the sea,

of the dragonflies and fleets of love-letters

that emerge from the hovels

we pieced together of decaying mirrors

and the detritus of junkyard autumns

to gerrymander a shrine of transformations

into a winged palette with two eyelashes for brushes

that sits like an easel on the lip of a flower

and paints the world with pollen.

I have had to become the sky

to bridge the space between us,

a junkie who snorts the stars

like a line of coke he’s railed into an arm of the galaxy

to reach out and touch you

in the rush of another dimension,

a gust of eyes in the back alleys of your neck,

the luster of a ghost on the wing of a nightbird

that delivers itself like the message

that hurls itself into the abyss like a bottle

I have drunk to the lees of tomorrow,

and eaten the visionary worm

enthroned in the fire-robes of ecstasy

and signed the moon in my passage

with a scrawl of harvest geese

to let you know

you are the black pearl

that has become of me

like a grain of sand

on the urgent tongue of the night,

the raven palace of plundered silver

you grew from the stone

in the brittle blossom of my heart

like a veiled planet

that I wander like water,

like a sleepwalker in a waking dream,

calling out to you from the inside

like the fountain of fire

in the heart of the earth

that unspools its longing like continents.

I don’t know what love is

when you unfold it like a map,

I can tell you it’s got your eyes

and your blue-tipped hair

and a gearshift in its pierced tongue,

four on the floor with overdrive

that can pop the clutch like a grape

and lay rubber or wine

down the main drag of a reckless mind,

and I want to touch it with the fingertips

of tender emergencies

and the feathered caresses

of homeless doves sweeping over its skin like morning,

and kiss its scars open like shy irises

and hidden starfish

and ruin myself like a kite in the hive of a storm

to taste the tine of its honey and lightning.

Your absence is the empty vase

of a flowerless cosmos

when I search the abyss of fugitive shadows

for a feather of your own

to exceed the wounded ink of my blood

with the eloquence of the wind

trying to light your candles

with a flaming arrow of the virgin bow

I cut from the forbidden grove of my voices

to sing to you through the night.

How often have I stood

in the doorway of your poems

like a city lost in the labyrinth of a stranger

and wanted to belong to you like an address;

or the ghost of the moondog on the window

you veil with your breath,

wondering if you’ll notice when I leave?

Do you know how many times

my mouth has turned into a furnace of poppies,

a holocaust of bees and coffins,

how many times I’ve drawn a razor

across my throat trying to bleed

my way into an afterlife with you

like a slash of milk

from the scepter of the dream queen?

I shed lives like a serpent sloughs

the surgical gloves of terminal eclipses,

or the cherry beds its blossoms

in the rain cradles of the gutter,

or the moon pulls away

from the wharf of its hills like a ferry

between one abyss and the next,

to pour my life into yours

like stars and rain

and the death-bed wish of a thousand secret extinctions,

an ancient wine crowned and anointed

by all the deaths and candles

I have wept my way through like a window in a morgue

to stand breathless in your shadow again.