Waking

"It's best when poetry doesn't quite have
Meaning but has at least
The possibility of meaning."
-- Alencia Lysander

What would I do, my body bathed
In the darkling pool of perfect happiness,
Flowing, quenching ‘round my toes,
Caressing by the heels, up across tendons
To haunches, through the haunches, seeping in the glutes
Up through veins – the way a virus, often dashing
Against the hard rocks in the body, works its way
Into cells, pulses the heart, and
-- bursting like flowers bud their blossoms,
Little by little
In the fragrant spaces of May – scatters
Through the whole, through the wide
Void of the body’s earth?

Surely I would be encompassed in oceans, then, surely like a liner
I would burst with flowing, and inundations of cool, cellulite-thick
Milk would sud me.

I need a nature that’s clean
Of the fear of death, renewed
From extravagance of living,
But where the dawns?
What crepuscules of silence?
If every heartache burns,
Will the chill when the sky gleams maubery
Be something, and not a vagrant dream?

Dreams fly especially, foremost in sleep, the way styles slither
In a thick inking, but especially the inking
Of tart blackberries into currant into wine. Wine,
The dark lake, shivering berries
By the sides of the current,
The mouth of the water
Singing an eternal and inevitable
Gape, and then the clash
Of cymbals,
Almost plummeting
Into the past.