I fall into your mouth like  a drowning sailor,

seeking deeper seas of love.

I abandon life on the surface willingly,

without  regret.

Its colors are pale memories 

of some one I no longer  have to be.

Riding the waves of your body,

I relinquish the shore.

You are all I need to know

of comfort and of home.

Your probing wakens me,

and I stream out  from my own center

like a lamp beneath the waves.

My singing is  muffled,

but you feel it in the small, fine bones of your ear.

I have carved my words on your shoulder

with my teeth,

and the sensations of love 

run through my fingers

like glass.

My hips disappear into your hands,

bones melting and flesh dissolving into light.

I am all air beneath you

and yet I hold you up,

suspend you above me in a trance of longing

too insistent for pain.

There is no time to be anywhere but here,

and I relax at last in the knowledge,

not yet full of you,

not yet wholly come into myself,

but spinning towards a future of being

without expectation,

and everywhere at once.

NIGHT SONG

You speak, and my heart slips between my legs and starts to beat.

“Uh-huh,” you say, “uh-huh,”

and your voice is in my blood, moving with  the music of the night,

drawing  me back into myself,

swaying with the rhythms of a dream, forgotten and foresworn,

languid,

full of summer’s heat in autumn.

Your words melt the stars above my head

as your fingers, later, will melt even the resistances I cannot see,

and I, full of gratitude and longing,

wash over you

and fill your mouth with love.

THE DIVERS

Fear grips me between the shoulder blades,

fighting with desire.

and in the struggle my soul screams in the electric air.

You hear me in your reverie

and try to call me home.

“Is this the price she pays for ecstasy?” you wonder,

weary from your own battles with the grinding past.

And with infinite patience you hold me,

pull me to myself  against your chest.

I sink beneath the bone,

trying to swim down to the sea of passion

where all lessons are one.

Opening the cave of your being,

you show me air beneath the water

and brilliant flowers which we smell by touching.

Pieces of my body crack open, come apart,

and assemble themselves in the water-light.

My lungs remember how to breathe

and death by drowning slips into the shadows of a dream

as we go down together.

THE INTELLECTUAL

I could speak my mind with my eyes closed, and frequently do  -

it is so soothing , this rustling of ideas.

It eases me out of my body, transfiguring pain,

making my head thick with comparisons,

squeezing the breath so no wind of anxiety blows through.

But you come, tapping at my window,

rapping on the floorboards,

thumping in the attic

and my skin jumps,

catching me by surprise,

pulsing towards you

with my foolish blood in hot pursuit.

The journeys of the mind spin far out beyond the galaxies,

and the universe is frozen in a thought,

but the body weeps at the cowardice of these adventures,

longs for the comfort of love,

and opens itself in secret.

You challenge my wanderings with a certain knowledge of my inner                            

   space

more profound than my dreamiest imaginings of desire.

“Here,” you say, “just here,” and I am with you, in myself, and all over              

   heaven.