Sometimes a fantasy . . . .

Somnambulant Blue: Selkie Song

She walked past and was gone.
We have lived quietly together ever since--
in the lingering anonymities of imperfect timings,
the awkward semblances of her glimpsed face,
remnant of a voice she shook off her tongue like rain.

I wear it like a ring in my ear.
I drizzle the butter of it up and down my thighs.
It is what my body hears.

Something past surrender honeycombs her eyes--
soft light on topaz daffodils. She watches beyond
the quiet clarities of a tired poverty. It feels like
a stomach full of nothing to her.

So she draws the sea, like a hood, over her head, covering the
porcelain solitude of her face with the blue ink of sadness she
holds in her hands. There is a song, a loving rondo, that spirals
between her limned niche in the stars and her earth-manacles.

I sing it at night
while she sleeps in the curled nettle
of her magnificent, criss-crossed limbs.

Beautiful Boy

Freud and Darwin Talk With
Sharon Olds About Birth

Her legs had never been spread further,
It remains a fact--I split her farther than she'd ever been opened before.
I filled her completely and made her scream
and scream
and that may be why, at first,
she could not love me
the way I thought she should,
the way I thought the world should.

I believe she loved me even if not always or not

all at once.

I cracked her legs open, emerged
from between them, head first, so that she looked as though
she was being pitted. I was like a woodcutter, splitting
the heavy logs of her thighs for winter fuel.

I was a bean, polished and creamy with her;
I wanted to dance in the wine of her,
smear it around with the bottoms of my feet,
slather my round belly in its robust color, until her warm rust-
red oils went from hot to chill. I had stuffed her, and made a
fat sucking- sound when pulled out. I would have preferred
to remain in her warm wet folds.

Look, they said, and rubbed my body, my arms and thighs and
penis,
Isn't he wonderful?

A couple leaped from the South Tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped. So many people saw this as a scar burned onto our brains. But a man reached for a woman's hand and she reached for his hand, and they jumped out the window holding hands. I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers, but I keep coming back to his hand in her hand, nestled in each other with such extraordinary, ordinary, naked love. It is the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and tragedy. It is what makes me believe that we are not fools to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fire, to believe that who we are persists past what we were, to believe against evil evidenced hourly that love is why we are here.

--Brian Doyle
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/questions/epilogue.html

Great Gig in the Sky

Cold Pastoral Passing


Bright morning star blown bright on blue,
upended egg in vernal sky,
cool light, first star that I see tonight, fair

augerer of old--portentous,
beauteous morn, borne along the grey
berth of river down below, the clear night

fading, passing. And I walk on
through that momentous start of day
toward the allotted hour of industry.

Ticking tiers of morning promise
still star-romantic in my mind
as I unlatch the office door wishing

on that last fiery light I'd spied.
The day's bustle of arrival
distracts me but a little. I watch through

a window to the world outside,
great river of the cliffs, and blue

sky
. . . cleaved
. . . . . . . . by some
. . . . . . . . . . . sudden
cataclysm,

Nature sheared and thrust aside, keels
to mortal jet-streams of collapse,
portal to the wind, fiery fuselage

unleashed in one great upsurging ball,
ungirdling flash of upswirled black
and rising storm, incubating suns

sear the flesh, hot drizzle, smoke whorls
and chokes my eyes so I am blind
and only feel a hand reach out to mine.

Whatever madness comandeered
the wind, another life survived
this cold pastoral passing, fingers locked

in mine, small hope abreast in ruin,
so now we move, in tandem crawl,
from planes of unforseen apocalypse

to what feels like the cool expanse
of space where once there was a wall--
a ledge now fringed with wire and bent barbed iron

at which we take a stand until
our joined bodies apprehend
each churning universal law at play,

the governances of the spheres
that build behind and open out
before so that we need one knowing look,

no more, to write our destinies,
and then we thrust, still bound, to fly
and not to flee, our one last volition

where below the once idyllic
river now runs slick and people
swarm like windblown poppies, like blackbirds

taking wing, rolling in a turn,
they spin and dock as not to burn
while we fall, hand in hand, we two silk-worms,

friends fused, linked thinly by a strand,
hurled about like autumn leaves, gone
like Icarus, unnoticed, from the world.