The lover doesn’t reach the beloved Except as a martyr or as a fugitive. - Mahmud Darwish

Under the dome of an aurora borealis
the beloved and the lover are frozen
into blocks of ice; this is how marine
          memory becomes a fossil.

Sun has swept the footprints from snow,
so that you can’t follow me or rescue me.
Facedown I lie in a muddy river to
         become the angel of an ice flake.

Pain all morning, pain all night
in the jawbone, behind the eye
in the ear's tunnel, at skin's border;
 	no sound, no vision, no sense, a mummy.

Winter stove fueled by burnt love letters,
a bottle of cheap wine, a carrot and an onion
on a cheap china plate, the last supper: tell Judas
	she must wait until I am well done.

Lichen on granite grows like hair on the pubis.
The beloved kneeling over my green tombstone
inscribes with her mouth this epitaph,
	“You never reached me, martyr and fugitive”

To match the night that sleeps in your eyes, I borrow words from morning light canting at the window.

I hide among trembling grass, tuberoses from the garden, and apple trees. Under these I would like to drown in the rivers

That flow through your arms, and tremble as I touch the coral of your mouth, the coal of your hair, the wind-sieved stars of your skin: revenants for which these lines are losels.

"It is the good darkness Of women's hands that touch loaves." ~ James Wright

Night falls early now. By six, the moon is out, and thoughts of you rise from the grass like moths to begin their night work. I would like to embrace them in your stead, distant one.

How bright is their rustling on the mind's window! But I don't have your hands to touch the good darkness under their wings, even as my famished body hungers for yours, summer's sacramental loaf.