Love's Terror

" Life's greatest happiness is to be
convinced we are loved." Victor Hugo
(1802 - 1885), Les Miserables, 1862

Love is terror when it succeeds. You are not
sure of your steps. You fall and clutch whatever
conceits right you. Love is terror when it fails.

You are loved. You deny it. You say I cannot be
complete as I am not worth the coins I scattered.

I diminished joy and wasted creation. You don't
believe me when I say we live in a city of worship
that reveals pleasure's flaws with common fables
written with slight curls of haphazard truth. We screw
words down with a turn of our wrist to create night,
daylight's foster child, before we set vast fires
to guide love away from melancholy demons.

The bastards set up shop in spaces where we
plan failure by refusing to believe we are idols.

We shall become an icon drawn for mythology.
Our life record kept by scribes for lovers
when Someday returns as dangerous lies.

Dangerous Ride

Will she settle within my hands?

When I dream I anticipate her poems
as longing sets our lips to rise and fall.

We are never ordinary
lovers on the usual street.

She knows I worry. She can hear
my footsteps, equally paced, not
measured but thrown her way,
caught to discover anticipated rest.

We open exits driven from storms.
There is the illusion of quiet
when harmony is clean in hands.

We are dangerous rides
with unpredictable ends.
No doors can close while
the underworld sleeps.

The Art of Love

K lays hands upon water's tangible face.
She hangs words quietly there, and breaks
molecular plane. Imagine how she strokes
his shell bearing the light as a ghost.
She speaks poems for the beginning.

K measures his painter's mouth
as she stirs sand in slow swirl
of tide-pool when her body rehearses
rhythm and tempo of darting violet fish
with curled shells and indefinite plan.

Her tango unsettles the waves.
She hungers to jazz radiance
across the top of the ocean
where she once walked unafraid.

Embrace bottom shells, he asks.
K tightens her fist to trace
polished white quartz
collected with driftwood
as one species of comets
drawn from the slurry of fine
sand dropped from her hand.

When K stands up,
the sun's heat burns
her shoulders. Her
heart beats faster, and
she almost trembles.

K's naked, swimming
alone, riding past tides.
She's more than any
singular universe.

When her hands push
oceans to flood, orchids
cling with lilies. She
pins her primal vermilion
rose to umber clouds.
They set fire to black and white
photographs of every other Genesis.

Visible Love
For K

Love begins in arc of daylight
that overwhelms the earth quickly;
gently the soul carries its own
heroes back to the origin.

Judgment opens love again
as an ordinary spell to cultivate
what is perfect as gardens glow
with an animated green, blue, and
crimson paint. Pleasure's skin dries
on fingertips to know that instant
when life completes in serene woods.

Most of what we knew was lost,
and what we came to know starts
up slowly and increase as that allure
we pronounce as great horizons stand
with sails placed at perfect height to water
and architecture strikes at sky with lover
at elbow to charge as titles of adventure
rip what we imagined from simpler facts
for metamorphoses and perhaps stagnation.

One is the foil to other, and we wait
to kiss each other as we refuse to breathe
again when we dive through deep water
to emerge with our feet kicking the past
away in the churn of legs and thighs.

K darts through space once upon
a time and gathers one soldier
and she leads him to righteousness.

She misses the whole mountain,
then falls softly in a hyperbolic curve
caressing the space between now
and then where nothing can pass
the axis, and we, she floats
within coordinated winds while
she stings and shapes startled
screams of desire marked in red
letters on a black sky. Fate is
indelible. It glows when K
gives voice to the fire inside
where she touches her skin
to enable fables to climb
broken branches, and we
new in her embrace drive
legs into snow boot prints
to mimic her steps, move
as she did, and lift up
we press pelvis to pelvis
drugged into eternal joy.

K shouts how she needs
new lands so she may step up
to her self and know how she
loved what she had written
precisely in soft books for journals
that kept truth in its own order.

Finally, she steps up to self at his
shoulders, carefully waiting
dressed in diaphanous ivory silk
each part of her body seen as love,
she startles quiet air and updrafts
swirl left and backward, right and
forward and she is perfectly tuned
with her head thrown back, and
thighs poised for pulse and resolution.

Love becomes the words became
the action of the mind on breath.
The delirium of new word drawn
on the paper grid and then nothing
for the final words have no lines, and
fixed space is lost when K touches
the poet in his longing for lyric scales.
He writes and she returns the words.
She sings and he echoes the poems.

When they are done, they are out
of breath and so full of glory nothing
can stop the range of their occasion.

Invisible Love Poem
For K

Watch her glide over trees
with hands that caress to
believe where she begins.

K understands and reads
his mind and caught in her
throat she closes over him
spreading wings adorned
with pearls and sapphires.

She lifts her neck with
out stretched hands; she
opens floral bodice and
naked breasts perfumed
with musk from paradise
float through hair and
arms, and lips and thighs.

She sleeps in their bed
and he has come to rescue
her from falling off some
pirate cliff, and clutched
suddenly the woman glows
beyond meager river
to become a lofted bird
held again until she raised
up perfect hill, and out
of breath sang last
melody as harmonic man
and woman blend with
sky until sunset stops
and dawn was never black.

We rode the words. Never
stop the journey. Carefully,
we plan our next embrace
until the fall of mankind anon--

Remember, women are
lions within the Holy Grail.

Invisible Lovers --for K

"I'm the invisible
who sees the truth"

Before I met the woman "who sees the truth"
I believed the photographs of dreams composed
from negatives colored with factual dyes.
There was no emulsion that bore the touch of light
without fogged images of desire covered by mask.
Blindfolds warped closed while shutters clicked
to expose gray sunsets with white opal eye.

After she spoke and I learned what I could
from the mystery and harmony of footsteps --
that grand parade that was first kiss to our dance.

Later under covers watching her eyes open and close
I felt where her body rose again to the ease of horizon
and the tree line from one field to another was natural
portrait and the falling red leaves made autumn blaze.

Pleasure cried from our lips as rivers bend
tall grass, marsh and sand with acres of legs
marching helter skelter on Venice beach
where we swam last month until our arms
would not stop and our breathing ran out.

2.
You are invisible but more alive
than women who I have loved.
I cannot explain it. Mystery does
not require any long story about
how it happens. It is. You dance.
I follow through the wild willows,
the earth is dry but they live long
and defy the natural properties
of thirst and the flow of leaves
over the endless track of lands
where we hold hands again.

"I crept into your skin last night
picked morning glory seeds from your lips.
I made love to you while you slept." -- Sean Farragher

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