mariposa de sueño

[zenathegreat]

i crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
silent and starving, i prowl through the streets.
bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
i hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

i hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
i want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

i want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
i want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and i pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.



naked you are simple as one of your hands;
smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round.
you've moon-lines, apple pathways
naked you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.

naked you are blue as a night in Cuba;
you've vines and stars in your hair.
naked you are spacious and yellow
as summer in a golden church.

naked you are tiny as one of your nails;
curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born
and you withdraw to the underground world.

as if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores;
your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves,
and becomes a naked hand again.

i do not love you except because i love you;
i go from loving to not loving you,
from waiting to not waiting for you
my heart moves from cold to fire.

i love you only because it's you the one i love;
i hate you deeply, and hating you
bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
is that i do not see you but love you blindly.

maybe january light will consume
my heart with its cruel
ray, stealing my key to true calm.

in this part of the story i am the one who
dies, the only one, and i will die of love because i love you,
because i love you, love, in fire and blood.

i do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
i love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

i love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

i love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
i love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so i love you because i know no other way

than this: where i does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as i fall asleep.

before i loved you, love, nothing was my own
i wavered through the streets, among objects
nothing mattered or had a name;
the world was made of air, which waited.

i knew rooms full of ashes,
tunnels where the moon lived,
rough warehouses that growled 'get lost',
questions that insisted in the sand.

everything was empty, dead, mute,
fallen abandoned, and decayed:
inconceivably alien, it all

belonged to someone else - to no one:
till your beauty and your poverty
filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

you are the daughter of the sea, oregano's first cousin.
swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.

your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;
your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of water and the earth,
conjoined in you like a formula for clay.

naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,
they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.
this is how you become everything that lives.

and so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms
that push back the shadows so that you can rest--
vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.

not directed at anybody. just beautiful.