Wonderful anguish unearths,
uncloaks the rapt borne inside.
“O, body, such a tripping kink!”
she laughed, and the spur just slid.
Down like a rider’s pressing heel,
grasping something of the kinship
between the dragon and the steed
where they yield to a piercing tip.
“And do you know that there is
a pyre in each papyrus that dies
if unseen but lives every time
it meets eyes as proficient as mine?”
she said, tilting her head way too back.
As if the point was a ball for me to seize.
Insensible to the insight from the East
that one who is like a mountain stream
cherishes the sacred feminine,
and so, he can rule
with simple measures
(Tao Te Ching Verse 28),
nay, utterly ignorant of the Goddess,
yet under her star they fought one another
to death—one side though still revering
her name Aurora while marching on
as children of the Evening Red Star,
but the others acclaimed Liberty, her other
name, and branded themselves with
the white star of the Morning Lucifer.
Balance, sway, and grace—that’s
how some of them move—in the way
in which a gentle sea rises and recedes
over the face of earth—again and again
or some go about composing a verse
out of images and sounds they write
in light—till it all comes and ebbs
as one while the heavens’ web is cast,
and, in those meeting sounds, so close
that they spell a soul for us, to taste
that nectar—bliss—is to kiss, and to kiss
is to wind and dance on singing tongues.
And the dark and pitch that grows the depth
and height of night tunes the gaze more radiant.
