Eros Conversing on Rivers between Life and Death
Lynn DoironShe is nipples and need,
Neruda, she is flowers and little deaths
and your river born in the Chilean Cordilleras
is no more or less than her creek
born in the Trinity Alps.
They are waters from latitudes
as strange to one another as you, Pablo,
to Lynn,
who was born the year you
turned forty-three. She is now
sixty-two. Pablo, Pablo. She wears
your words in the froth of her skirts,
in the pink dawns of her thighs
where your music rubs days
into delights of darkness,
enters a womb of papaya and pomegranate,
of seeds ripened and scattered and rising,
and where these waters come
there is salt and there is beginning.
There is ending too.
Memory, alive as coyote
with no pheasant or vole to grip
with hungry teeth,
leaves her sere, this bone
of past days,
bleached as a skull
where water has been, until
she dreams the long tremulous windings
of your breath, Pablo, in her hair.
Then, what is inside softens and swells,
extends and ripens like plums fallen
with bright, heavy fleshing
to split and glisten,
to feed lemon bees, apricot wasps –
and they eat
as if no feast will again open for them
and glut them with such sweetness
bite by bite by ripened plum.
Branches lighten
and the heart of the tree
is an amber bead pulsating
through the rings.
For this reason she wears your words, Pablo,
in the green days of dying and age,
the scent of static waters too close,
where moss hides the mirror
of sky from itself
and she will be soft sediment
pillowed on bedrock
without current above,
growing into all that has ever been
from her own bones.
But life breathes
moist from your Chilean lips, Pablo,
even across the miles of death,
your kisses, your tongue, Pablo,
between and upon her breasts,
the quickening
of her heart like a ship’s bell on a rocking sea,
the ache she will satisfy
when you come to her
out of jasmine,
out of horizons quivering gold.
Who will care
that she is learning to smile
under water, laughing
beneath the snow melt?
Her flow will take her
to buoyant salt
and the river
from the Cordilleras will bring you, Pablo,
to meet; translucent hands
will touch.
The sea is an orgasm
coming and coming and coming,
smoothing the broken glass of what has been
into jewels of nuance and grain,
shadow and light.
The hinged mussel opens,
releases its succulent self,
as does she, Pablo, raising her skirts high,
the looseness of the sea gliding in
and through, proving
you live, proving
she is alive.
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