Our Conversation

Pure gaze, you are lightning beyond the last trees

and you are the last trees’

past, branching

green lightning

of terminal brain branches

numened densely with summer’s

hunter color, as night comes on,

the ocean they conceal

gone berserk, wind still rising.

Pure seeing, dual vortex doors

to the blue fire where

sex is burned away, and all

is as it was and I am being offered

in your eyes, as in cupped hands,

the water of to never thirst again.

Again I turn away,

and the future comes, all at once

towering around me

on every side, and I am lost.

Pure looking, past pain

(this is promised):

we must have wed on poverty’s most hair-raising day

delighting, flashing risk, risk

unfailingly lighting the way,

anything possible

in that dissolving of seam

between minds,

no more golden time—

each step I took

the right step, words

came to me finally and finding the place

you had set for them,

once again

wrote themselves down.

Till true word’s anvil ring, and

solid tap of winged blind cane come,

I wish you

all the aloneness you hunger for.

That big kitchen table where you sit laughing

with friends, I see it happening.

And I wish that I could not be

so much with you

when I’m suddenly not; that

inwardly you might switch

time, to sleep

and winter while you went about

your life, until you woke up

well,

our conversation resumed.

Ceaseless blue lightning, this

love passing through me:

I know somehow it will go on

reaching you, reaching you

instantly

when I’m not in the way;

when it is no longer deflected

by all the dark bents, all

I tried to overcome but I could not—

so much light pulled off course

as it passed within reach, so much

lost, lost in me,

but no more.