Love Poem of the Calendar Alphabet

Birch-bright are these bodies,
cradling our newborn selves.

Like lightning you impale my heart's red berry;
I study the oracular entrails, still smoking
grey as a rowan fire.

Nursing each other with sweat clear as the snipe's song,
we would drown but for these egos--stout oars of ash;
We are left flooded, silt-fertile.

Fire spirals from us as from hewn alderwood,
whistling like a crimson gull.

Sifting apart, we fall, lost grains through wicker sieves;
the moon owns me, I grieve where the willow mourns,
and your is the hawk's trial: insight and despair.

Zygotic lover I labor, repeating you
as the thrush stutters the rainbow:
Behold my staff. Where I have struck
or leaned on you, you put forth leaves.

Hold me chastely as the night-crow rasps terror;
nothing has any value.

Desparate, we signal across two needfires; we are naive
midsummer wrens, battering the door between us.

Twin, which of us is sacrificed? I, the arch, the altar?
or you who cling there, blossoming?

Concentrate on each other in one shell, we solve
the crane's asymmetry.

Quince be your canopy, the garden your refuge,
the unasked question your tether.
I peck at the gleaned field.

Maenad that I am,
I thirst for your vintage self.

Gates open in me; now would I resurrect you
with that love which strikes the blue swan mute.

Gnostic geese, we who dwell empowered
under one roof.

Ripening well into winter, we may yet learn
how our roots entwine and drink at one source:
an elder wisdom, therapeutic, a mutual doom.

And yet , alone, each of us thrived in salt-charged sand;
I had no brother who sought me, as you did
your sister--or am I silvering through her mirror,
a lost Tamar myself, thinking I seek my son?

Our histories are being burnt away, like furze
singed to clear space for fresh sprouts' greening;
we sense our own preparedness for this buzz,
electricate, in our touch.

Uproarious
at last as mountain heather, we arrive;
you are drenched larkspur by this passion
and I am dry of wing-ready, now, to hive.

Entropy, we know, consumes all our consuming, will blaze us
and then bury us-- but upright in our graves
if we have earned it, like poplars
exuberant on a darkening autumn hill.

I will not love you then, nor will you care for me,
despite all our intentions--except as our dead mouths
may speak roots subtler than these tongues:
poems probing through the earth-dull ears of others,
gnarling into a single trunk, an utterance.

Joined at such a height,
we gaze at one another undisguised--
this risk dangerous as a fall
toward no certain ground;
this space massing white as distance
which shreds, powerless,
before the glance of
eagles such as we.

Robin Morgan