1) Entering the house

The stones have doors
that open at one glance from your bluest eyes,
and ringing all the bells of the forest,
your lips and your hands ripple across the landscape.
So you took me, baby, to the house of love,
carried me there on your broad back
on the wings of love, always such a gentleman,
and we flew together east of the sun
and west of the moon
and past the borders of the country where I was born.
We landed in the woods on a grassy knoll,
where every utterance sank deep into the sod
and fed the roots of the trees,
where our sighing, wet mouth-sounds
rose like the smoke of sacrifice to our Goddess
and she said: all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals,
and so we pleased her there.
A few years later, I wove for you that
moss-green shirt you’re wearing
and stitched it all around
with the sinews of my heart.
For me you built a house,
and honored me and blessed my skin and eyes
and my perfections and my imperfections
over and over again amid the falling blankets.
 

2) A scientific explanation

The closer to each other that our bodies reside in space, the stronger the current that pulses between us. Our love is like gravity, atoms slamming toward each other across vast reaches of outer space. We burn all the brighter for it, and clearer too, stretched out shamelessly across neverending blackness, and hurtling ourselves inward toward each other as fast as the Universe itself is galloping outward.

Animal friend. Beloved beast. Furry, fleshy, pulsing, dripping, skin-and-bones love, if we are joined, it’s not because of anything we think or think we know or even feel. Not even emotions are all of it. Our love cannot be separated from our bodies. Love resides in the body. The body is the house of love and blood sings the same hymns in your veins and in my veins.
 

3) An ocean of bed
 

I drift alone on an ocean of bed
in a hotel room
in a distant city,
struggling to see the laughing lifeboat of your face,
the granite shoreline of your jaw,
the soft parting of your lips.
If I squeeze my eyes shut, I can catch your salty breeze,
warm, well muscled breath,
shoulders flexing
and I can feel your hands,
sighing over skin and waves,
the touch of your breath everywhere
even on the pearl shell insides of my thighs.
Your breath, your warm scent and the flexing of your shoulders and your red head bursting over morning shimmering sea like the sun between my legs.
 

4) Letter

Dear Jack,

 I remember entering the chamber of love with you a long time ago. The air quivered around us, sending shafts of light against the walls. This place I am speaking of magically appears whenever we make love and there we have gone to live at last.
 Now we live in our house of love all the time, as if we were living in two dimensions. Our house overlaps ordinary life like the fairy realm, existing at once together with it and distinct. I can see two and three and ten thousand outrageous worlds, each one overlaid, but this one is ours, my love.

This place is ours.
 

5) Why I cry

Life slams me up against the wall, and here I am again,
clutching onto your shirtfront with both hands,
sobbing and gloomy as any March
that ever slammed the rain against the bricks.
You gotta hold me babe
because I’m going down.

I can see behind the walls, I’m telling you, I can see.
What I see, it’s driving me down.
I can see through the walls,
right into the curtains drawn windows of the eyes
into the soul’s living room.
I got the weird, blue, x-ray-vision curse, babe.
I can hear underneath the conversations
to the rippling of the air between the people’s mouths.
It makes me sick.
I can hear it all the way down into the basement.
All the sores and passions of the world, its wretchedness and trash
roar through my insides.
It feels like being stung by bees and spiders.
I’m violated, ravaged, raped and tossed aside
by the unwitting and the unaware,
tortured by every petty, who-me? thief of spirit
that ever stalked a downtown street.
Easy prey, that’s me. An open vault.

I was driving down the street, see,
and all I could see was this strange, cruel world we’ve created
out of the sneering shadows of our own unconscious minds.
We don’t even know we’re doing it.
Isn’t that a scream?
We’re cruel to our children
cruel to the earth and clay,
savage to the Gods (who love us tenderly),
ruthless to each other and ourselves,
repressive to the spirit,
sadistic to our bodies.
We ignore the soft and fragile flesh
all wrapped up nice
in thin and delicate pink shells,
cutting instead of loving,
slashing and
burning instead,
bludgeoning, murdering, stabbing and bleeding and dying all over the goddamned streets instead of remembering who we really are.

The horror of it catches up with me once in a while.
It would follow me on stealthy, demon feet
straight into the backroads of sleep
if it wasn’t for you.
I struggle to keep afloat,
just me on a tiny you boat, awash on a garbage sea.
 

6) My eyes are opened
 

Love has opened my eyes.
I have seen God enter you
in the moment that you pause,
wide-eyed, before you plunge yourself inside me.
I open to you,
beloved everything.
I am Earth Drops Her Blessings Down,
and you are Spirit Moves Through Me.
When we make love
all the walls crack in all the houses
up and down the street.
Rain floods the creeks and lakes.
Seeds rise up and heave themselves
against the breast of Earth,
and the Earth opens herself that life may
pour in and out of her.

The eyes of my body have opened
even to the furthest reaches of black space
and burning stars.
We are the universe, babe. We are all there is.
We encompass everything.
We are God, Enveloping Being,
making love to itself
over and over again.
Everywhere you look
(clouds make love to sky
winter ravishes summer)
you and I are the passionate God.
We make love over and over.
Everywhere you look we are making love,
just yesterday for instance, in the bed upstairs,
tangled in the blankets
in our house of love.

living in the house of love
 

     For jack, with love from lilly