You come,
Rose for my kiss,
Your face an effloresce as
Our lips together softly press.
A kiss:
Velvet petals jetting,
A fountain of whorls
Inside a rosarium of gazing
Cascading
At the center
Of sudden beauty,
Rising into a liquid pillar
Of love and giving.
You flow
Over the undressed stone
Of my body
Like a luminous fountain
As birds of the temple garden
Applaud us in secret calls
“Shakti-shakta-shakti, yab-yum-yab-yum,”
This mysterious, twilight language below the rose
That, teamed together, a part of each of us
Decodes a tiny feather of.
Together we take a destined step
Toward a bed of flowers
Yearning for knowledge of the other's body,
And not even knowing how,
We are transported by seeming happenstance
To this temple of the erotic.
Two figures
Cast into a myth.
Neither a sage nor an adept,
Nor in any way equipped
To play the role
Of a god or goddess,
But with a tender kiss
Any lovers, whomsoever,
May embody the archetype,
And what was carnal
Is now transcendent…
Your soul to mine,
My eternal Savitri,
You who have elected me
As your chosen one,
Your Satyavan
I behold you now,
Soul of Woman in flesh divine.
In splendid form of youth
You lift me
In white election
With your eyes of love
To re-embark with you
On the long ancient tale
Of how we were born and both began,
And hearing it once more
To die inside each other's arms
And so to truly live again
As you take me deeper in embrace,
And soon we are hand in hand
In the halls
Of Shiva and Paravati,
Lotus hipped and
Hard as rock.
Our clothes fall there
Our names, too.
Their echoes heard by none
Save the immortal gods
At the core
Of stone.
This core in which we move
Inside each other
Like the gods through this very power
Of love,
Conjugating a million verbs
That never move, never separate,
Our mouths closed
Upon each other’s in hunger,
The secret language of stone
Accruing no way else.
This cibation, this feeding of the alchemic crucible
This act of taking food,
This mixing of the inner elixirs
That turn to gold,
This rolling and spinning
Vocabulary of speechless bodies
For a man and woman
To speak throughout eternity
In sighs and moans.
Your body declares itself to be the knowledge of
What it is that made the stone
And mine the temple made from it
As we build higher and higher, making it
A tender edifice of sighs,
A temple we adorn
Like Maithuna,
Fashioning each other into god-like shapes
Of male and female
In divine embrace.
Your bold caresses stun me,
Turning me to stone.
Your kisses carve me,
Revealing the buried form of a man within.
With the hammer and chisel of your sex
You break me free some more.
I emerge in clear relief
Inside this breathless gallery of gods,
A panoply of reverberations ringing across my skin and
Pounding within my heart.
You let loose a dallying laugh
Like a rivulet of joy in my ear,
I float on your beauty like a river
That sculpts your figure
Into my wide eyes.
A tear of gratitude flows and I laugh,
Incredulous at such great fortune.
My eyes and ears are four rivers of paradise
That overflow, winding intimately
Through these curvaceous interiors of sandstone
Ringing with pleasure.
We pass through the archway of each other,
Exploring every hidden recess
Of the sacred and profane,
Past every last bold exhibition there
Until we find
Within this insatiable gallery
The alcove reserved for us.
We couple amidst
Anatomies of lapping stone,
Tier upon tier of us
Inside this temple of sexual love.
Immortalized in stone,
That part of us that consists of time
Melts and is quickly carried away
Down the confluences of limbs and endings
To merge in a final sea,
Writhing delicately upon telluric waves
Gently turning
As we turn
Into one another,
Solidified in ecstasy.
Together forever possessed
With the appetite of stars utterly ravished,
We devour the fruit of each other’s flesh
Through layers and layers of sensation
Down to the stone,
To the seed we throw to the earth
That once finished, immediately re-grows
Into a horoscope of our heavenly bodies:
Oppositions, conjunctions, strange and rare alignments
Of sextiles and quin cunxes.
All of these erotic poses
The syzygy of heirogamos
As we recreate in the fields of procreation
Like fools gaming at horoscopes,
Like babes toying with holy fire.
Yet, we are the only children
That we desire for now,
And we give birth but to each other
A new man and a new woman.
Our birth accompanied by cries.
Yours building
Into a screeching monsoon,
My breathing
A howling wind therein, panting
Gusts of wind and rain beneath
Mad cloud chase,
Our bodies forks of lightning
Inside this hurricane,
Our limbs uprooted by
A storm no walls can sustain
We lie drenched:
Naked casualties beneath a rubble of sheets.
Dying, we learn we survive
All possible disasters:
The carnivals of treachery,
These masquerades
Of adulteries and deceit,
These saint’s feasts
Of vengeful martyrdom,
The birthday parties
Inside orphanages of need,
The casinos of love’s bankruptcies,
The long careers of deprivation and loneliness,
These medal games
Of all of love’s defeats;
The rejections, the disqualifications, all the disappointing finishes
And injuries, some life-ending.
We remain in each other's arms anyway,
Your victory guaranteed in my embrace.
I sheath you like a sword ever-ready,
For we are both edges of the blade
Of the legendary sword of Zain
Which we have pulled from each other,
From out of stone, from out of our hearts
And we sharpen each other to a fault,
Blade to stone, stone to blade
Until the blade vanishes
And the stone is sanded away
With just a sigh.
A fountain of whorls
Inside a rosarium of gazing
Cascading
At the center
Of sudden beauty,
Rising into a liquid pillar
Of love and giving.
You flow
Over the undressed stone
Of my body
Like a luminous fountain
As birds of the temple garden
Applaud us in secret calls
“Shakti-shakta-shakti, yab-yum-yab-yum,”
This mysterious, twilight language below the rose
That, teamed together, a part of each of us
Decodes a tiny feather of.
Toward a bed of flowers
Yearning for knowledge of the other's body,
And not even knowing how,
We are transported by seeming happenstance
To this temple of the erotic.
Two figures
Cast into a myth.
Neither a sage nor an adept,
Nor in any way equipped
To play the role
Of a god or goddess,
But with a tender kiss
Any lovers, whomsoever,
May embody the archetype,
And what was carnal
Is now transcendent…
Your soul to mine,
My eternal Savitri,
You who have elected me
As your chosen one,
Your Satyavan
I behold you now,
Soul of Woman in flesh divine.
In splendid form of youth
You lift me
In white election
With your eyes of love
To re-embark with you
On the long ancient tale
Of how we were born and both began,
And hearing it once more
To die inside each other's arms
And so to truly live again
As you take me deeper in embrace,
And soon we are hand in hand
In the halls
Of Shiva and Paravati,
Lotus hipped and
Hard as rock.
Our clothes fall there
Our names, too.
Their echoes heard by none
Save the immortal gods
At the core
Of stone.
This core in which we move
Inside each other
Like the gods through this very power
Of love,
Conjugating a million verbs
That never move, never separate,
Our mouths closed
Upon each other’s in hunger,
The secret language of stone
Accruing no way else.
This cibation, this feeding of the alchemic crucible
This act of taking food,
This mixing of the inner elixirs
That turn to gold,
This rolling and spinning
Vocabulary of speechless bodies
For a man and woman
To speak throughout eternity
In sighs and moans.
Your body declares itself to be the knowledge of
What it is that made the stone
And mine the temple made from it
As we build higher and higher, making it
A tender edifice of sighs,
A temple we adorn
Like Maithuna,
Fashioning each other into god-like shapes
Of male and female
In divine embrace.
Your bold caresses stun me,
Turning me to stone.
Your kisses carve me,
Revealing the buried form of a man within.
With the hammer and chisel of your sex
You break me free some more.
I emerge in clear relief
Inside this breathless gallery of gods,
A panoply of reverberations ringing across my skin and
Pounding within my heart.
You let loose a dallying laugh
Like a rivulet of joy in my ear,
I float on your beauty like a river
That sculpts your figure
Into my wide eyes.
A tear of gratitude flows and I laugh,
Incredulous at such great fortune.
My eyes and ears are four rivers of paradise
That overflow, winding intimately
Through these curvaceous interiors of sandstone
Ringing with pleasure.
We pass through the archway of each other,
Exploring every hidden recess
Of the sacred and profane,
Past every last bold exhibition there
Until we find
Within this insatiable gallery
The alcove reserved for us.
We couple amidst
Anatomies of lapping stone,
Tier upon tier of us
Inside this temple of sexual love.
Immortalized in stone,
That part of us that consists of time
Melts and is quickly carried away
Down the confluences of limbs and endings
To merge in a final sea,
Writhing delicately upon telluric waves
Gently turning
As we turn
Into one another,
Solidified in ecstasy.
Together forever possessed
With the appetite of stars utterly ravished,
We devour the fruit of each other’s flesh
Through layers and layers of sensation
Down to the stone,
To the seed we throw to the earth
That once finished, immediately re-grows
Into a horoscope of our heavenly bodies:
Oppositions, conjunctions, strange and rare alignments
Of sextiles and quin cunxes.
All of these erotic poses
The syzygy of heirogamos
As we recreate in the fields of procreation
Like fools gaming at horoscopes,
Like babes toying with holy fire.
Yet, we are the only children
That we desire for now,
And we give birth but to each other
A new man and a new woman.
Our birth accompanied by cries.
Yours building
Into a screeching monsoon,
My breathing
A howling wind therein, panting
Gusts of wind and rain beneath
Mad cloud chase,
Our bodies forks of lightning
Inside this hurricane,
Our limbs uprooted by
A storm no walls can sustain
We lie drenched:
Naked casualties beneath a rubble of sheets.
Dying, we learn we survive
All possible disasters:
The carnivals of treachery,
These masquerades
Of adulteries and deceit,
These saint’s feasts
Of vengeful martyrdom,
The birthday parties
Inside orphanages of need,
The casinos of love’s bankruptcies,
The long careers of deprivation and loneliness,
These medal games
Of all of love’s defeats;
The rejections, the disqualifications, all the disappointing finishes
And injuries, some life-ending.
We remain in each other's arms anyway,
Your victory guaranteed in my embrace.
I sheath you like a sword ever-ready,
For we are both edges of the blade
Of the legendary sword of Zain
Which we have pulled from each other,
From out of stone, from out of our hearts
And we sharpen each other to a fault,
Blade to stone, stone to blade
Until the blade vanishes
And the stone is sanded away
With just a sigh.
