Madrigal

You are love- for me-

The rainwater after the Sahel drought

Silver, as blown glass in a Florence flat

Overlooking a café where madrigals were once

Tattooed to salt pages under candles burning down,

Slipping down the narrow strands of a hermitic willow

With toes deep in a field where a million night and days

Undressed, fell onto jasmine sheets, and walked away,

Like the echo of laughter in a favorite memory

Shared now, only, between a dying man

With film eyes and a starving hand

Warm, once, against the lost skin of a lover

Buried, where the willow roots cry against pillows of dirt

 And you, love, are bound, bent to comfort, not mend-

But light, at least, an oiled satin wick in the den of bombed out darkness

Almost like Ma Tovu, a salat, planted in jute soil

Between bound leather thick as the skin of a deserted hive

Somewhere between the sound and the silence

Over the sand river earth where a loved one lies

And I-

I am here-
With elbows the color of Chilean dust nailed to the plaster edge of this rooftop

Making lipless love to the sun, curling

Like smoke against the iris mirror of an oracle

Knowing, that no matter what-

No matter the pebble moon, the crush of time, the sheared promise of a forever,

The first breathe and last gasp, the certainty that you and I will one day drift

Into ash from ash with ash becoming- ash

Oh, no matter that, that or even if the world were to choke

And our stars fall from their asphalt crosses

You, love, would remain my godless heaven

In a hell you’ve taught me to love-