Poetry and Writing

Her breath smells of lemon grass, rose hips,

and ferns.  She eats lilies.  She is almost a saint.

Here the absence of desire

sits on a hard chair, reads without turning pages.

Abstinence is never speculative.  For her

the salmon never swim upstream, or game birds

worry the underbrush.  She never says:

I can imagine or

This is what I want or

I hated him.

Not to need is power.

Her appetites are folded in the corner.

They are teeming and urgent

as the dreams of the Masai.

They are smooth, old scars.

They are forgotten.

Blessed are the empty.   Herbaceous darling,

you shall be the apple of God’s eye.

The eyes of God are twin, untroubled pools,

the efflorescence of stones.