Portal of the New Year

Touch

In the steam, you disappear. Monsieur, I feel your presence only by knowing. You sit before me until you vanish; hot clouds dissolve us into vapour. Your strong sensuality, like Zeus, yet you become a phantom. Until I am alone. When the hot breath of air presses in on me your hands rest on mine, our knees touch. Two figures of naked skin streaming as the steam subsides. It was in the room you built, this womb of steam from which we emerge wet and hot into the cold air of the welcoming night.

Rapture

How deeply
the unfolding
through the water
of the blessings of
our bodies of rapture.

We are clothed in the streaming truth of
the night sky, its melting snow.

An offering
to fire and transparency.

In the hot springs as the clouds uncover
the full moon of the New Year
you plunge into me
while I dance in the water,
surging, volcanic.

Waves of heat
absorb us

Into an immensity that has no name.

In the creative presence of sensuality
our union effaces the conditions of union.

The essence of passionate love
is mystical union.

We become
a writing of love.

Transfigured.

Rupture

Do we imagine the depths of each other
differently?

Were we Shiva and Shakti dancing?
Our own Lucía Y El Sexo
under the moon in the water?
You kiss my breasts as I float
before you, I massage your floating
rapture,
and how many times do we
undulate?
How continuously
do we hum ecstasy
in the silence of the Winter's night?
Your final surge
rising, fertile, flowing
light, filling the lucid
darkness,
honey of
delirium.

We offer each other such
pleasure.

Afterwards, the next day,
driving me home, you said
you wanted to be clear,
that you love me
but weren't in love
the magic of transformation
absent.

You want your life to change,
that's what love does.

Your New Age
speaking
cliches
clashed
with your
strong loving
and a year later
I received a letter
from your other lover
about your nights with her
filling the hours
around ours, as well as
the others you had
slipped into bed with.

It was never
a question of love.

Portal of Breath

There are words I must speak, though surely never will. You call me across the expanse. I kiss your closed eyelids. I lie over you softly, breathing with you. With each wave of breath, like sea foam, I cover you with a silent resounding mantra, I love you. Even while you call me to you, you do not hear the rippling of my heart. It is when you are asleep and I lie with you that I hear the fullness of the silence between your breaths. You are the full intoxicating sea-garden in repose and I am calmly delirious in the scent of the night. In the morning you have forgotten everything; even the savouring. How do we "translate the silence of the real encounter between the two of us?"¹

Relation of

Monsieur, you can't be possessed.

One can only come into a relation of openess with you.

You leave, and yet always return. What you dismiss, you affirm.
Yesterday was no; today is yes. The horizon floods like continuous
Kabbalistic light.

______
¹Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans. by Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.43.
_____
for Kaj Devai, from the manuscript, EnTrapped WOR|l|DS, 2006, in which he is listed as a reader of this book in my Google Docs, and in 2007 he accessed and printed on his printer and read apparently a few times, and then had me read this poem to him over the phone in 2008, and agreed that in this writing I should tell the truth.