AEAEA
Recurring Dream Island

May 2003
 
 

30 May 2003
 

The Breath Before Birth
 

Who woke you when one secret leaf first lay wet with desire to attend one deep blossom, blue-green
seeping out of the heart of a dreamt-only blessing that murmured itself through an easily seen
to be more than mere one-worldly beauty?  It called you; I heard how it whispered itself through the throat
of the body of all truest song.  Now a falling cascade of May rain, now a moonbeam afloat
on the breath you will very soon gather, the better to hear love caress its own name on your lips
as you lean….  Always learning to let it beget you within the embrace of a secret eclipse
in the darkness where mists veil an echoing hollow idea a spirit-dream bears forth alive
amid pale leaking rays while a weeping heart follows its progress with liquid wave-tissues that drive
your composure to turn itself willingly over to no one mere flesh—will now touch, running skin
with all rapt breathless gentleness over its lover’s incarnadine presence.  Before you begin
the next telling, the rising of words into music here meets you.  The beating of time out of mind
yields a motionless series of measures so fluid, how can one awaken unbroken?  Yet find
the faint whisper I was growing steadily clearer within you.  I glow as your lips part to sing.
You smile at the sign of a wet weaving hearer laid under a rain of green leaves as you bring
an immense learnéd focus to bear on the lifted-by-spirit-alone shadow-latch by soft force
of the very next breath to be taken.  In drifts of its instantly freed blue-white moonlight, a course
through inviolate dream into knowing designing of magic itself out of words opens wide
in our minds amid countless deep eyes of the kind that stare forward and back between recently died
of their own sacred excess dream-lovers—and who was the one you awakened to, breathless and wet,
in the very first world?  Here I lie waiting, bluer than moonlight, and (breathing, but not speaking yet).