Under the few plum clouds
the wind is still juicy
after last night’s storm.
My bare feet love the damp
mossy stones, every cell
the pungency of wet soil.
This weather is nothing
but the sexual charge between us.
Everything you’d look at crackles.
Leaves sparkle like the washed
glass you’d choose for your milk.
Our flowers remind me of Goethe’s
“Colors are the deeds and sufferings
of light,” all of them for you.
The air feels like your body,
just out of the shower,
hugging me from behind, and
when you kiss my neck, the last
raindrops from the trees are
the drops of water from your hair
that drip down my spine where your
hand touches me under my shirt.

I’m in love with the smell
of tangerines and coffee
you bring when you come to me
smelling clean like the garden.
You say I smell like you when I’m
almost done sucking the seed.
In bed we spend the time
it has taken us to turn
this slum of weeds into wine.
Reaching up into your hair I’m as
astonished as when we gather a vial
of perfume from a bed of lilies,
or hunks of honey from thistles,
some of which you stir in my tea
with a finger of love. I am

not sentimental — I just love
everything, this classical wind
in the trees, your voice velvet
as rose petals blown on the grass
in shadows purple as bruised plums.
Why not believe these doves
in our junipers are other lovers
making love, or that everywhere
the music of angels moves us
because we rejoice in it?
Nothing is possible. Here,
where we live, we are decaying;
yet here we live; lightning brief,

yet this humid sunlight suggests
there’s something transcendent
about our souls’ flesh being
smushed together into one —
this feeling of cuddling in blankets
of thick air after the storm.
Lightning is but a seam stitched
over a rip in the sky;
or is the rip; or its cause —
what matters is that behind the rip
is your naked body bringing me the sun
in a Wedgwood bowl. This is
my theosophy, my vision of heaven
that feels so good it must be
eternal, or if not, then
this will have been enough.

I’d like to sculpt the goddess
of this garden in purple jade
as an oracle of the gracious
ethic of eternal change.
The divine is here in this
tasseled wind tussling your hair
and the absolute love between us
which is simply impossible
to see except as it moves us
like this wind blowing thyme.
Someone thought of purple jade
and invented alchemy
that could change grapes
to wine and wine to blood —
metaphor is as concrete as love
and what is holiness anyway
but roots of wine and bread
transfigured into our bodies,
or wild fire of the forced lily
heretic at the stake
blooming next to our bed;

who would have guessed that love
could grow like a cultivated weed
from these ordinary bodies of clay?
All day I am overwhelmed.
My passion for you distracts me
like the green drone of a lawn mower.
You push against me, leaning
over to smell the yellow freesia
I’ve put in a jar of water
just for you. The water’s colors
of light scatter on my notebook.
In that voice soft as a feather
blown from the doves’ nest
you read to me the poem
I’ve just written for you.