Timeless Skies

You lie asleep beside me, one hand on the pillow and cupped at your mouth, as if to tell a secret.As if you might say in your sleep what you could never find words for awake.Or as if you called across a din of other voices, or the howl of empty space. Calling

because there are no bells to strike the hours where we live. And I must know when to kneel and when to rise. What to praise and what to curse. I must know how to bless and how to receive blessing.

One hand on your pillow and cupped at your mouth, as if you spoke a word you'd kept to yourself all day, waiting for your most unguarded moment to say, a thought meant for me, meant to be shared between us this way, sealed this way, a secret no voice can carry without destroying, a word without carriage, except conveyed in the peace of your body and face,

a word born out of your deepest rest, a word which only my own deepest breathing and happiest rest beside you, face to face, free of thinking, can sustain.

Maybe you had to be asleep to say what you knew to be true. Or what you had to say you might not could bear to hear, and so you must say so softly I must close my eyes, I must turn inward, to where you've made a room and a bed inside me, to receive it.

You say: We cannot look upon Love's face without dying. So we face each other to see Love's look. And thus third-person souls suddenly stand at gaze and the lover and the beloved, second- and first-persons, You and I, eye to eye, are born. But such refraction, multiplying gazes, strews Love's eye upon the objects of the world, as upon the objects of our room.

My brush, hairpin, mirror, book, your loving look finds each of these things lovable, I can see. Things by any other measure poor, your look crowns to make them your heart’s royalty. Face, blush, breath, eyes, evanescent, pledged to death, nowhere stored, Love’s look gathers within its fondling to adore.

This strewing and gathering of Love’s face, of Love’s gaze, and only this, begun in death’s audience, is the founding action, call it the fundamental paradise…did I say paradise? I meant paradox…the fundamental paradox of the breaths we breathe, the thoughts we witness, the kisses we exchange, and every poem you write.