Eric M. Petit

Sound, Still and Right

 

He marveled that he had ever come out of such dark and terrible thinking that had tried

So desperately to hold him fast in place, to keep him blind in his eyes and heart.

Almost love had abandoned him to that cold way of being, swallowed him in its teeth,

But she, who grew at utter odds within that thickly constraining bound

And sprung free in the sunshine and wild and full flowing, hungering,

She, whom when they kissed, tasted of earth and sky and felt of sun

Flowing through the flesh of his lips and tasted of fresh rain upon her tongue,

She, whom when they made love, filled the chambers of his heart with incense

Rising from a thousand thousand dead altars, flooding the arched beams

And dark temples with ringing praise, with echoes and ululations.

How could she have ever loved him so deep into the veins, so close and so clear into the roots?

How could such a love be his life and such a heart be his home,

When against all odds they lived on strange and distant planets at opposing angles to each other?

He could only thank the universe each morning when he woke and found her there

Sleeping so soft in his arms; he could only look at her with wondering eyes

As he might look upon a sea or up into the infinite reaches of the stars.

He had known her as a wing knows the wind that lifts it;

He had known her as a stone knows the roots and earth that wrap it round

And hold it firm and sound, still and right. He had loved her

And so he walked tall and strong and deep over the land and felt the rightness

Of it in his bones, flowing up through the cords of his limbs

Like sap returning from the roots, like buds wrapped and coiled

Tightly within the tips of his fingers, long preparing for this moment.

And there was no fiction in it, no wavering image, no hollow sound.

The grass and the trees were in their place, just so, and the light

And the shadows, the days and the nights, they lie happily together

Just as they ought and where they should. They belonged and so did he.

He felt as though in this one woman he had wed the earth and the sky

And married the wind and espoused the flowing waters and the burning fire.

He felt the long, still feeling slowly unwinding somewhere at the back of him

And many cold and hard things unravelling in his eyes and heart and mind.

He felt peace gently binding his feet to every stone and step of the ground

And as they lay there together like two glowing suns in their urgency

He knew that no longer was he that lost man of lengthening shadows

Who went about the earth broken and bare; no longer was he that one of hard sharpness and wary thoughts

And when he closed his eyes he dreamt of nothing more than her and here and now.

He dreamt of this sleep and this night, this closeness, no more and no less.  

 

Eric M. Petit