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September 22, 2013

Love’s Detours. ~ Michael Graber {Poems}

This Hum

This hum builds between us,
the same way two rivers
join salty water. As red as
your lips after we kiss too long,
passion for you flies through
street lights. What fools try
to organize the flow of people?
They must not enjoy love’s detours—
that time you got lost driving
down the street you grew up on
overtaken by a glance or lingering
remark. Only such willing, capable
souls can swim here. Don’t ask
how or why. Science or Philosophy
might be able to talk about union,
but they can’t embody it, can’t trust
their lover will catch the wave
with a receptive ear, then offer
a naked syllable keyed into
what is with the precision
of a tuning fork that works
in two worlds at once. Some
believe only four directions
exist: North, South, East, West.
But there is another direction,
another dimension, inside. Here,
intimacy is the native tongue,
mercy erases all debt with a dance
or a curl up on the floor cry, in
the hive where hums are born.

Distance

You’ve gone to the mountains
for Christmas. The actual distance
measures almost 500 miles,
but real distance does not exist.
All lovers live inside one another,
in the same nest where death’s
curtain has worn so sheer you feel the divide dissolve. The animal. The human. The divine. Three in one. When you sense your lover’s mood from far away, you fall for it—the significance of the story. How, not that long ago in the history of the planet, one birth changes the world. Hope tastes like cranberry.

 

 

Swimming

I’m too skinny to contain
the infinite ocean of love.     
How do these senses fit
inside the human form? Bees
and birds and whales and epic
tales converge within. Over
there, a street fight. Here,
a monastery. A drug deal. Earth
school. All turns to tone.
Your love becomes a songbook,
a psalter containing a map home.

There’s work to be done—
the harmony that creates a third
note when two voices blend
takes practice. And we, like Gods,
break out laughing at how drunk
the joy of making feels. I tried
to quit loving you, but couldn’t
fight nature. This meeting was
arranged hundreds of years ago
and the urge for union has been
building even longer. So, forgive me.
I’m too skinny to withstand this wave,
and there is no choice. Swim.

A Few, New Chords

The day when the Northern hemisphere borrows sun
from the South you must stretch yourself to catch

its hymn. Microtones unlock the cells medicine,
but can only be heard in an open field. To play her

you have to learn a few, new chords and increase
your capacity to embody bliss. The chords hide

at the cusp of magic and music theory, blushing
from the feeling sparked by the sound of light.

So much of your life will seem lost—the salty grief,
the bitter days—that you cannot push forward

until you hear her bare feet winding their way
where all the detours and main roads meet.

Now pour your higher nature into this melody,
inhabit the rising body of this new form.

Interpretations

There is no right way
to read the silence created
after our eyes collide.

Each definition holds
true—yet defining
filters out connections

we cannot deny when sleep
won’t come. You are more
than the ability to accept.

Come. Go. Call. Renounce.
Love knows no distance
and melts with glacial

patience. My father, drunk
in Heaven, knows your name.
My mother compares my wives

to you. Generations will sing
about this sacred expression,
this song and all the others

that hit the heart where it
makes nectar. Why wall up
the garden when it is not

a garden? What grows
in this rainforest has the seeds
to rebirth the planet. Why

define love with convention
when each interpretation
holds only one piece

of life’s infinite patchwork?
The only thing self-evident pivots
between desire and acceptance.

Like elephant love on Facebook.

Ed: Renée Picard

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