I Am The Wine

How are "self-help" and "self-control" working out for you? For me, they are illusions. "I" am not very helpful to "me." I can no more control my life than a falling leaf controls the breeze. But I can surrender. I can sink. I can fall into the Grace of the Divine.

As I get older, I plunge deeper into the sap, traveling down the stem, drowning in the seed. There I explode into a scarlet blossom of death, the one you see in your garden.

I am the wine you love to smell in those invisible breaths of pollen. I make the medicine drip from berries in your pineal gland. It clatters down a string of pearls in your vertebrae toward the place your songs come from. What kisses happen in the jasmine pistil at the center of your hypothalamus? I have seen them. They set off thunder under your breast bone.

I know what the sound of unseen wings in your heart means, and how often stars make wishes on your fingertips. I scent what inebriates the wind rummaging through your garden at midnight. If you knew what I know, which is almost nothing, yet much tastier than the knowledge of philosophers, you would not take a single footstep for granted.

Removing your shoes, your graduation gown, your underwear, you would reel glistening softly through the forest tonight, yes tonight! letting the golden moon make honey of your silence.

Photo by Peter Sheffler