Once I planned to walk you, ashes in hand,

to the places where the snow drinks sky and back,

carrying with me all the memories

the touches and hip fits and breaths like sighs

and offer you up to the gods height

where you always choose to sit, crosslegged

thoughts running through your head

until emptiness beat drums through your bones.

 

That is the way it is with love, carried with you,

day by day, warm and supportive, cupping

all glory inside until it climbs higher and higher

like the stairway to heaven and there's never complaint

never sorrow, never the will enforced upon self

as if a committee or blood flood or chance

could know truth as it exists at the height

where one comes to say what only the heart can say.

 

To have danced body to body

hand to face, lip to lip and known ecstacy,

relief, the solar wind blown through being,

to hear the heart beat of yours on mine, entertwined

like the cathedral call to the hungry and lonely

such a love is perfect memory,

belongs to me like refrain, like mass,

thunder and wonder and sunder, oh, sunder,

doesn't ever make you less what is mine.

 

Sheri Fresonke Harper