BENEATH THE TREE

This is a piece of paper.
It used to be a tree.
Birds lived in its branches and sang.
In the winter it stood naked
just like you and me.

If I had known you then before we both had lives
we called our own,
I would have kissed you more than once
beneath its cool September shade,
I would have read you poetry, the songs of saints
who longed for God and nights
when darkness was the sword they carried by their side.

Small deer would come and stare at you,
wondering in their strange and silent way
how you became so much like them,
living in the city as you did.

You would turn to me and smile,
half here and somewhere else,
heart about to open like the mouth of one whose mother's breast was near.

I'd suckle you, but don't know how,
feed you berries cooled in snow,
wipe the sadness from your brow,
and just when you were thinking it was time to go,
take your hand and hold it --
proof again that even if we had to die
the time we loved was all we ever had to know.

Your heart
(the place no man had ever been,
the prayer you are, your Master's twin)
would fly and I would meet you there
beneath the tree,
drunk with love and majesty,
knowing you were sent to me
by the only one who loved us both.

Unsure of who I was or what you were about to feel,
you'd pull your knees against your chest,
lean further back against the trunk,
moving as you always were towards roots
and the endless possibility that called to you
beyond the man now child at your breast.

I'd want to tell you everything, the ache, the need,
the quaking God within my bones
that like a sudden thunderstorm from Mars
releases me at once from all my loneliness and pain.

What shall I do with my hands here?
Touch you?
Pray?
Pluck something from the sky
that you might recognize the feeling
most men hide from you in fear they'd never love again?
Could you take it -- my looking at you -- the adoration
that moved me to hold you in the first place?

Would you look the other way or wish I'd leave
so neither you or I were left to interrupt eternity,
the refuge of a perfect life beneath a perfect tree?

I'd do my best to take my cue and look beyond your eyes,
but seeing nowhere in this world to rest my gaze,
I'd circle round and round until I met you once again
beneath the shade of my eternal longing.

The rest?
A masquerade,
pure escape,
a pilgrimage away from you,
the one in human form who called me here
and wasn't sure and isn't clear and doesn't know
and cannot say what both our hearts have understood.

Was there a nest above our heads, a cloud, the moon?
Was the light reflected in that lover's sphere
once stolen from the sun?

I take your hand,
I kiss your lips,
I hold you and am gone.
And then?
A small deer speaks, the Master grins,
the dance of love begins again.

Excerpted from Thirst Quench Thirst