Magneto Rain

You are the magnolia starlight

That slips between the sleeping willow branches

Like silver through a dream catcher

Or dew between California vines

The color of burning incense, Sri Lankan cinnamon

Like a dusk caught in the bend of ashtray mountains

Or grains of Bavarian barley rolling off the palms of horse leather hands-

 

And you, love, are the magneto rain

Colliding like wedding rice shelling the aisle of a bombed out basilica

In the only dream I’ve ever come to love

Falling like snowflakes, the silver cities with glacial bones

Cube eyes, Escher spires for arms, legs, and teeth
Stained Inuit blue, a Morning Glory blue

With petals caught in the hymnal of the wind

Or the turning dress of a Parisian barmaid who writes poetry on bathroom stalls

A shallow blue like the veined bottom of a mountain stream

Carrying the thawed verse of grey whisper down grey backs and grey sleeves

And grey arms and grey gutters hanging off the brow

Of a hole in the wall restaurant with bee wax candles

The color of a Shanghai afternoon burning like a lighthouse

Or sound caught in a bagpipe at a requiem dedicated to some mortal god

Where romance is served to couples in porcelain, roasted

With ale, spiced walnuts, and Velva cheese-

 

Oh you love are the collision of galaxies

The cohesion of spent drops in a terra puddle

Illuminated words in a Franciscan prayer

Caught in the eggshell canvas of an Anatolia manuscript

Yes, love, you are the constellation

That guides the sailor north

The moss that softens the stone coffins

The Hyades, the Andes, the beauty of a naked sky at midnight

Stretching like a fortune teller’s tent

From the rib of this desert to the rib of the next

A chord that rings and rings like a the thundering of a waterfall

Between gargoyle crevices in the gut of a soft spoken flamenco guitar

Bound in mahogany with horn inlays and ivy up the neck-

 

Yes, love, you are the eye of the storm

The fourth rosary bead where my thumb and index

Have finally found an answered prayer

The April that breathes life into the asphodel and the Adonis

The orchid where my salted symmetry lies

The face in the mirror where my lips have settled

The beauty with a body like a bomb

A mind like a supernova

The one for whom I’ve made it possible

To love beyond the boundaries of impossibility

Because I love you that much-