Feel the Burning Embers

So filled with this love for you, I’m floating,

This heart, swelling and stretching, pulling and soaring,

I am light as wind, heaviness does not know me,

The cold hands of things grasping, slipping off me like silk,

This grass is growing me, up and up, so high, touching me,

So deep, flowing me like a river, pouring me into your heart,

These flowers are growing so sweetly here in the dark,

They told me the secret that made me smile so bright,

You’ve got my name in your heart growing blossoms,

I’ve never been so strong as when I heard your love singing in the leaves,

My coal black spirit never sparkled half this bright,

The stars crowded round to look with lust at all this light,

Can I tell you the story pouring out of all my body?

I think you know it already, my Love, it’s yours after all,

Every drop of this blood writes it in every particle of air,

I can’t believe I’m not singing all these birds to shame,

I can only tell you I feel nothing but cool air rushing over me,

I’m flying so true, diving and turning, flying straight into you,

How can I tell you the feel of this naked soul rolling along the clouds?

I’m laughing at all these storms and lightning crowding out of my way,

I’m dancing and plunging like a young hart in the sweet summer grass,

I’m leaping the rushing little streams, the light of my eyes, lovely and terrible,

I can’t believe I ever slept, ever closed my eyes,

How could I ever have laid so still in the darkness,

Or missed this spinning earth, or the fire in my bones?

I’m burning so hot, rushing so cold and so clear,

These sad little mountains are all wearing right away,

And flowing down my skin like dust in the pounding rain,

I’ve never felt so fresh, never been washed so clean,

I’m spring wearing flesh, summer raging in a body of blood and light,

I want to leap into your eyes like lightning, make love to your spirit like thunder,

Can you feel this little building of heat and desire between us,

This beam of fire stretching from our bodies and growing hotter?

Can you feel this pulse drawing us into each other’s eyes?

Come and burn this night with me in the arms of darkness,

Let us steal moments from time’s fist buried deep in eldest night,

Come, inhabit the spaces between my spaces, the words between my words,

Touch the place where my poetry lives, feel the glowing embers lying red and golden there,

You are the wind and I am the coals, light me afire again.

Eric M. Petit