I have learned your language
of far away hills and pink, opening hands.
With each word your skin becomes
more like a highway road, a sunset or a cruelty
and I say to you of forgotten tomb stones and royal
purple inks inside witchcraft eyes, "You are my only."

But you are steadying your hands at a pile of papers
and fingering a fascination of rosaries, oranges
and doctored words about the right to die.
"Good-bye."  Someone says, Love, with a strength
begotten from a father, family, water, tea...

It is a snare.  You never left home, eyes remain
tenaciously closed.  There is a shrill whistle, it is
my soul!  Here!  Here is gold and silver and blood,
close the door.  Here!  Here is a ghost inside of a jar,
a jewel, the rocky basin of your hips...

When the afternoon is trying desperately
to unlock the words left behind your tongue
and children play upon the flagstones of your chest,
the light is all indigo and cleansed...  Now!  Now speak!
Your smile is composed of the tiny fires used for sacrifice.
Your features, your shining cheek-bones are become laughters.
I am still astride certain trade-winds, they are the trumpet-calls
of your fingers finding obscure uses for blue heats, reverences,
and destinies shaped like the little molars of sea stones hiding edible
shell fishes small as your eyes.

But other words and more originary languages
come, bearing more opaque play, bearing your
more youthful body, your more precise dying.

It is as if, each time night came, you gathered
together all the more familiar aches and pains
and set them to work the way oxen are made to
drag the plough.  I was made to feel helpless
before the single star of your spine.

Your lips fed greedily upon the endarkening
nothingness.  You explained everything with a
glance.  With an arc you slid into the new age.
You wore tiny, sparkling fishes on your body.
You spoke of hurt like a lover and choruses
of angels turned all your sex into opportunity.

I saw graceful self-denyal.  I saw two suns,
four stars and a moon larger than the nearby
mountain arrange themselves into a figure
capable of transmitting the reality of your regrets.
All this at the closed door of your lungs, the
clouded over window of your stomach.  Your
eyes I could not see, they were twin voids
and filled me with fear and loathing.

Caught forever in a cycle like jaol:
logics snapped beneath the incommensurate
weight of your tiny, leaden breasts.  Two idols
made of golden dusts communicated with
each other purely with winds.  I began to run
but reality did not scroll smoothly about me.

I began to speak again
but I no longer knew the concept
called "Word".  Endless galaxies of
longing stretched themselves between
everything actual and possible.  I saw
your maroon eyes glitter with alien
diamond pollens and they communicated
the things I could not say...


As if a spectre of the amphibous
man-frog haunted the green pool of your belly,
a wailing song began there - it is Time!

The ancient cisterns left abandoned on the
deep grooved surfaces of the Red Giant's moons,

the weeping light trapped in the infinity of its icy mirrors,
remind you in your sleep of the last recorded instance of
fertility on its doomed and jagged, cratered landscape:
it is your forehead, consternated with a mathematical problem!


I began to speak and to run, carrying
withered plans in my hands shaped
like reeking fish-bones.

All thorny, the small hairs of your body
have come to signify unimaginable musics:
ocean blue tempo, sunset rust rhythm,
and meanings taken from still unexplored Pacific trenches:
bring the food to red, unpainted lips; I can see you by
the window waiting seated in pools of yellow but
darkening hopes.  It is holy!


A certain Visitation has occured,
assisting you in the daily and repetitive task
of nourishing your body: it is almost human!

The Kaleidoscope like skin of the small dragon
is predominately gold, silver platinum...
There are smaller, more intelligently curved lizards
suckling upon the Sapphire's breasts...
Transmuting the thought containing the axiom
for all human peace, it is made known
simultaneously everywhere to each individual's
degree of yearning for Honor!

See the small, clawed hands are in-themselves
jewells and all these contained in the luminensce
of your thighs!  Revealed in a cruel flash of light,
a merciless wind catching the clean linen worn
over your body in a type of carress!

See what one understands by Death entangled in
the crystal roots and veins of your enmarbled flesh!


A certain Rare Moment has come to pass
and you smile more cryptically than ever before possible!
The air around you has been almost painfully twisted and
smithied into the pure Form of a Question!

Even the lie must function before the possibility
opened in the naked holiness of the word!
The night is seeping into your hot hollows!
Cavities and small immensities, Love, the
light in your nails are known as The Absurd!


The epigrammatic functions of your flesh,
wherein can be deciphered all human history,
are now known as practically as the Old runes...

Tracing the contours of your evolutionary legacy,
Speaking the supplements of your carrion destiny,
One word bubbles from the wound:

"Life" here and laughing like a child.
Where the adamantine spider infects its
young with hardness, your laughter has come
to pass hitherto unheard of Edicts indicating
quantum softness!  O, Idolatry!

See the men bowing wrinkled heads before you!
O, misery!  The time should pass like blood to the sea!





_____
_____
Stanley Gemmell
January 12, 1997
FL. USA