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I removed your face and set it on

the bedside table like my

grandmother's diamond wedding ring.

I fondled your nipples with my breath,

purple tipped mushrooms trembling 

out of sod, amethyst deceivers,
laccaría amethystína, whose roots 

mingle with mycelium a hundred 

pungent underground miles.
No wind can uproot your breasts.

I cradled them in my palms,

gently slid them into poached egg dishes

because the only alters we have left

are in the kitchen.

Carefully unzipped your spine,

the little ping of each vertebra,

the sound of bees over a Spring stream.

What I found inside your body?

Another body.

And another in that, mistaken

for the soul.

You used my missing rib to

lever the stone from its cavern of cruor.

My heart,

freed from the word "until."

Your grandfather's golden

pocket watch, my face
with its big and little hands
spread to a quarter of three.

Unwound, ticking stopped.

You did that to me.

You closed the lid engraved

with forgotten names, and snapped

it over my timeless pineal gland.

Set it on the table by the jewel.

Then raveled the luminous rope

from my thighs, winding it into

your coil of naked space,

my vagus tethered to countless stars

reeled out of me with all their

ecstatic hooks

as a fisherwoman nets a silvery 

glistening mist of sardines

from the indecipherable oceanic dream.

You emptied my night.

No longer haunted by the amphibian
sparkle of previous lives,

I awoke in holy blackness,

arms outstretched for generations

past and to come.

You held all the light now,

all the embryos.

You could weave demons.

But you had no fingers, and no face.

Nor had I.

We've evaporated into 

each other's geometry

of solitude.

We've become a single eye

after the dream is over,

resting awake inside,

just before opening,

just before creation.


Mushroom photo by Steve Axford