Perhaps, wide-eyed, you‘ve heard it,

your heart pressed hard against some tiny world:

a celebration bursts clean from a lily‘s bud,

or the flash of plumage from a diving wren.

Love draws itself from the sonorous earth,

and rouses like a waking god.

Listen: it sings at once from the thickest rocks core,

and strongly from the ocean‘s coldest deep;

is present as the canyon opens wide

to receive the naked glory of the sky.

The sequoia rises from a gnarl of roots

like a giant vibrant length of praise.

Put down all cold books that snare,

stifle all verses that barb and numb,

to join hands with life is a hymn in itself,

bare feet in wild dust: an answered prayer.

The divine thrives in the world as sense:

no word or name can form its tongue.

The sunlight, pooled and gleaming warm

in the cleavage of a lover‘s breast,

and touch, closer than caressing light itself,

holds its secret like a sacred flame:

our bodies merge as the Word of God -

into love we dissolve as divination.

It is not the heart that encloses the beloved,

but the beloved that fills the void of the heart.

The flower, too, opens its loveliness

on the Earth that is itself in bloom.

Let us wish we may be equal to the moon,

that all the light we receive we give away;

or in being equal, we are one with love

in flowing ceaselessly again into the world.

Without regard for death or for previous battles

and their fierce toll, you must go out alone to the badlands.

You must go out alone to the badlands,

as if to meet a band of barbarians, or a thousand moaning tigers

You must go out without armour or scimitar,

without a moment's training in the art of the fight

You must go out without a feeling of impending doom,

as though to be clad in all of vulnerability was to be clothed

in all of courage.

You must go out, you must go out to meet love

in the open, not as a warrior, but as a hopeful child.

I.

I wished that I could tell her, but in transit

one can only ever be rooted in the trauma they are doomed to hold -

that is the constant companion, the undeciphered ball

of terror (for some, manna for others) - the monster

which is constantly rebirthed. How many times will we meet

and I be different? How many hurts will be dragged like anchors

into each new life that I am harboured by, how many wonders

will roll from my tongue to transform into detritus or flaw?

She asked me who I was, as though uttering a curse.

I quoted a tree I knew - simply stood there: still; incomprehensible.

II.

There is no clear answer that the talons can give:

your life, dropped from great flight and tenderised,

will make your crumpled body sing the chorus of all pains known.

This is the wilderness one never wants to dream of.

The patina of your blood oozed onto rock

attracts the same crowd that seeks all glittering things;

your soul is touted as a vial of tonic for every ill -

you're a life-changer, a commissioned little factory of happiness.

She asks me to become the beast. What if I already am?

What if it is all I can be, to grunt and love loudly?

III.

All this reckless babbling after identity: if in love we are not consumed,

we become the unreliable narrators of our own lives.

Nothing happens to us but through us - the self collapses,

disintegrates - the thumping question is never who,

but how love is to be made from the disintegrated self,

never how the self is to be constructed from love.

Anxious to believe the immeasurable perfection of it's own legend,

the lame ego must whimper, for the answer is a splintered crutch.

I become nothing in love - by love I am liberated.

Those who seek must know they are looking for nothing.

In my not knowing how,

in my not knowing why,

grace has gathered me up

from my careful life -

has filled me with strange condition.

Love has claimed me.

The wild bird of your freedom

has taken nest, by choice, upon my hand.

In its rejoicing

the wild bird of my heart has taken flight.

How ancient this fever's warmth

in its clinging to the body;

how ancient this spreading of wings

into this void above the earth,

into this vast sky of the unknown.

The wild bird of your freedom

has nestled, by choice, upon my hand.

In my not knowing how,

in my not knowing why:

love has claimed me.