Eclipses Are For Poetry

Really every day should be, but let's mark the occasion with an old poem that I recently uncovered, a love poem written for my muse.

I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t having a secret conversation with someone that I had dreamed up. I’m an only child so imaginary friends were a thing, but it’s something more than that. I began to notice that most of my stories contained a recurring character and certain features grabbed me when I stared at art.

On the plane as I traveled the last time to Turkey something happened mid-flight where I became convinced that I was being hugged from behind. It felt like arms enfolding me. My first thought was — the plane is going to crash. And then it happened again and again throughout my life, this sense — usually before a big event — that I was being supported from behind, enveloped in warm wings.

Guardian angel? Muse? Both? Does it matter?

Eventually I gave him a name and put my pen in his hand.

This is my love poem to him. I thank him for his service because I’m a notoriously tough case and if muses roll their eyes, mine’s probably caught in a perpetual state of exasperation.

But sometimes I make him laugh and often we cry together and throughout it all, he has helped me order shadows into light and peer behind the veil into mystery.

If he were a horse, he would be Choo or Bentley: dark, mysterious, and patient.

---

Always Here

Night jasmine in your hair, sweet watcher
decades peering.  I sense your coming when
nights mix heat and chill, pairing seasons,
the early blooms sighing shape like the
mountain’s back, blue formed, binding.
You gift me with rainfall, blight etching dampness
tuning my hearing, sharpening my ink.

A waking ache sliding leaf-like down
the dew-damp window.  You are a page
heavy with night’s curtain.  There are
vacant counts of miniscule hope, un-time
when I believe in you like the zealots
assurance of her own salvation, sacrifice bought
sealed in hot stone.  I imagine you
waiting rag-clothed, smelling of rich spice
in the center of some rambling collection
of all the farmhouses I have ever desired,
land-lusting, cleaving the red dirt to claim
some acre for myself.  It is never enough.

I find you instead, wood-tasting, caught
lightly in a pencil’s shavings, in the
space before the sentence ends.
Your long fingers lace lightly near
my palm, if seasons have fingers,
if folktales spread like ferns growing
near the churning river’s current.
You have broken god-sworn oaths muttered
stage-style before a priest.  You have dirtied
the hem of hand-woven lace.
With joy you have allowed me to blame you.

For in proving your fiction, I have seen you 
made flesh – have trotted the oak shaded
pathways of a vestal calling, of what I once
coined my coldest fear, to simply find you 
standing at the mouth of the path, 
dark eyes closing, warm arms folding
your robes smelling of juniper and ink.

You have tutor-taught me this lesson:
that there is no outline.
That will rises suddenly in courses
beyond the foot-tested pool of panic.
That loves needs no bone held object.
Sweet scented hair grown long by
finger’s trickery, writing.  Purple welts
raised by words, flowing.  Mouth no less
tasted by sentences, finishing.
The secret path leading to a beloved 
smiling in the forested shadow of a longing
that created you still from memory.
I will write the words savagely, quiet phantom,
until you come.

Eclipse shadow light through the trees makes me happy.