Adam’s Country

My love, people are cruel, sometimes, in the very way they move.
The way they refuse the world makes a tormented wind in the minds of others.
They want us to be like sleeping leaves shaken loudly
Into the moiling passage of their presence.

But you, lovely woman, are like sound
Crouched demurely outside its own echo, its own fame.
You are the breathing silence
Just before the stride of wind that shakes hands
With all the trees, you are that first shadowless gust which,
Like touch before hearing, kisses me like a new fate.

You are what the rain is
Before it can be seen, when it is as still
As a lake of glass in our hearing, when each drop has the intimacy of a name
And is as a gentle as a childhood memory
Returning, unexpected, to smudge its pale hands
Against our shoulders.

Oh woman, why do you still walk the hours in the cold clothes of your name?
Why do you carry yourself separate like the flag
Of a country you will never call home?

I would take you to place where the wine-black distance in your pupils
Drinks from midnight itself in my lands, I would clothe you
In the dresses of horizon stitched to horizon
By the stars that partake
Of my eyes. My love, the animals awaken there,
In the deep meadows of my seeing, and pass the portals of the grasses
Into a greater light.

What would it be like
To pass with them together into the secret moods of an Eden still growing
Behind that angel with his sword of fire guarding your mind?
.
Whenever I gaze into the million cathedral windows of the snow,
They tell me how I love you, that you are the impossible rose.

Oh, woman, let us step into the great harp of the winds themselves.
When we make love, we’ll awaken into new bodies,
Into the grace of wild horses
Throwing themselves in innocence against the mane of a great sky.