can there ever be enough of you? A collage for Jessica

 Connection. Hearts touch, souls kiss. Rilke would understand perfectly

the collage of you

that what matters is not
what is written on a page,
what matters is
what is written in the heart, on the skin, the rhythm of blood in the veins of, nerves of,
love's cry for its other,
which emanates from the heart without guile or burden

Jessica, a poem in a word in a name crafted by Shakespeare, with its roots growing in Genesis, still growing the dark

perfume of magnolias, the poems I write on my skin with the feather of your scent by a candle in a corner of the darkest night

on the wind hungry for touch, flung by impatient white brushes, winds painting waves of darker impatience across the serrated furrows of a remorseless sea

often, I forget the furnace of my days
close my eyes and lose what needs to be,
and keep in my heart the
fragments of stillness amongst the turbulence of your words, your blood
which spills its hearts over the white paper of yesterday, today,
tomorrow

the debacle of a wounded soul wandering in a cruel theater,
celebrating death when,
until your whispers and sighs brought resurrection

and so I went alive, seeking magicians
and princesses  

to my enigmatic lake
of blue and ancient stone
smooth again with the dark magnolia of your perfume
beyond the,
in the shimmering of,
blue

discover the stone is and has always been a flower,
of water, bits of sunshine blurring the edges of shadow,

the stone speaks in ancient tongues
speaks the words of your poetry, of love
despite the chalk apocrypha of pain,
the graffiti of fleeting Huns who cut your days to shreds of heart's flesh

despite the towers of Babel created
in the forlorn hope of conversations with god,

so I went alive, seeking magicians
and princesses

and
on the unimaginable top of that tower found singing one bird
one princess
one song
one
you


Rilke would understand perfectly.