There’s No Place the White Clouds Can’t Go

Nowhere the plumage of doves and angels

isn’t moving

over the dusty stairways of the Ancient City.

 

The Moorish tiles spell

 

as always, the name of God

in letters of fire,

in the shade of blue that is exactly your eyes after love.

 

I know both those loves.

They take wing inside me,

as if I were an invented city

and you had designed the streets.

 

I am all plaza and gazebo, 100% zocalo

where women

in long silks spin in an ecstasy of Godfire.

 

That is how it is entirely.

 

Just like that.

 

Ajah, Ajah, –

Come to me as if you are me

and I will come to you

 

Every alley, every sidewalk

crack is breathing in enormous broken joy

 

You know we have come at last home

because we can’t see anything here

that is not already the Beloved.

~

Love’s Offices

Love with its featherweight measure

With its a e i o u

With its why of the cry of the falcon, of the beloved in the dark,

the dredged riverbottom  of bedtalk.

Love with its calling from centuries,

with its clock of barely moving hands in the plaza of Perugia,

Love with its tiny steps

and kimonos sleeves wet with walking in the  morning  garden.

Love with its capacity for rhyme

And drift. Love with its backward glance

And endless coffee.

Love with its heat lightening and all night itch

Love with its red red wine

and bad driving, hillsides of pine and honeysuckle tango.

Love with its stone Buddha

in the almond scented light.

Love with its too long sentences and fierce electric.

Love with its armchairs of desire, and groceries of tomatoes, fresh basil,

garlic and olives. Love with its redundancy of salad and lack of pizza.

Love with its piano teeth, and islands of soft winds,

the Southern Cross at midnight, and mangos mangos mangos.

Love with its dire relationship to roses and thirst

Love with its Catalpa trees and unfought wars

Love with its chrysanthemum eyes and velvet skin

with its leopard eyes and slow discovery of other music.

Love, o love with its Rothko eyes, and Brancusi hands

And vintner’s tongue and champagne tongue.

Love, thief and scholar,

giver and gift.

The dreaming we leave behind at the moist blue end,

the dream we wake from, tender, each morning.

 

Thanking Andre Breton, for Free Union….

~

Editor: Hayley Samuelson

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Judyth Hill is a poet, teacher, author, living wildly as ever, on our bougainvillea bejeweled ranchito, Simple Choice Farm, just outside San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She has published 6 poetry collections, innumerable magazine articles, & wrote the hitthe-Bigtime poem: Wage Peace (it’s right here in elephant journal!)and takes writers & foodies all over the world on WildWriting Culinary adventures, www.eat-write-travel.com. Contact her at  [email protected]