Your Body Is A Perfect Land

Your body is a perfect land; the rhythm of your seasons keeps eternal time.

Your skin is perfectly lined and dimpled; you are written with runes.

The algebra of your body is so perfectly factored that your curves approach no asymptote;

No parallels or right angles, only the majesty of crescents, half-completed circles of possibility.

You shatter the fractal, you seep incompleteness because you are full; a perfect spiral stumbling outward in discovery, a spine of split-open melons.

You are the fall, you are the dance; your hollows glow like fruit.

You contain all phases of the moon, your belly perfectly swelling in a round reflecting sea.

I am not a farmer, I am the singer of this poem; I do not harvest corn and wheat from the gentle slopes and valleys of your perfect body.

Nor do I gather the golden pink intoxicating fungi from your dank and perfect woodland shadows.

I gather your music, I sing your body; you are the garden, I am only the Spring.

Your hair is perfectly contiguous with shadows shape-shifting into clouds of silver, tumbling like sunset over changeless water.

Your smile is perfect, the way its poem of silence curves down and upward again, suggesting the unfathomable darkness at the center of a rose where death is born of beauty.

Your eyelids perfectly droop in the purity of sadness, your eyebrows are the distant range of the mountains of hope.

Whether you sink in perfect melancholy, or evaporate into an inward sky, you midwiff every mood, you splay the rainbow like nakedness, genuflecting now to purple, now to green, now to the ochre of your fury.

Whatever you feel, bright woman after rain, you cannot escape your wholeness; you repose in the now of your perfect body;

The contradiction of knees, ankles, their comedy, growing younger and more perfectly awkward every day;

The paradox of your hips, swaying like jungles in the silken mist of perfect modesty; your arms and feet such priestly ancient gestures to themselves.

Your sexual yearning for your husband is as perfect as your yearning for God; for where the impure see two, the pure understand all yearning as One, and your body is your soul.

The flame of a sigh that burns your faithful lover on the pyre of your blood is a perfect breath of pranayam; your cry of delight, charged with attention, a perfect prayer.

No one can fathom the precise location of your heart: that perfect mystery, that wild uncertain particle of the infinite.

You are an underground network of roots, connecting us all in the dark, nurturing one through the death of another.

The bones of night shrug perfectly through your naked shoulders, starlight trickles down your face; your moon-blood is the dew of devotion.

When you cannot laugh, you don't try; you bless the shadow, and those who mourn are lifted by your perfect sorrow.

And if you laugh, it is real, it is sunrise; it is the perfect clarity of dawn.

When you emerge from your element, the bath, unborn children gather in a sunbeam to sparkle on your perfectly brown flesh.

You shelter the perfect delight of the ancient forest between your thighs, where a portal opens from earth to heaven.

Your hands so perfect, when you make them empty to offer nothing, they hold the sky;

Your eyes so perfect that when countless angels leap into the well over there, they whirl into this world, over here;

You cause the smallest noticeable creatures to exist with your perfect seeing, which spills among ferns into forest pools, where they dart to spawn and die among the gleaming intimate pebbles of your mindfulness.

When you dance, the green beneath extends you; you roll the earth and make the seasons forget themselves, the rose in December, the ice jewel on an April trillium.

In you are all anomalies, woven by the asymmetrical glance: when nature makes her perfect mistakes, the sparrow sings, "Of course! Or course!"

There had to be pain to make you this perfect: there had to be a darkness in delight.

And when you sleep, other planets stir in your cauldron of dreams; the dance continues in the perfect void.

There, inscrutable patterns appear on your egg, like cracks: the perfect Words that sing us before we are conceived.

We come from you; from you we come, enwombed in woman.

That is why I offer this poem of gratitude.
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You may hear this poem read HERE 
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Art by Jasmine Aldin