to lie here on this old pillow
listening to the endless calling
of the night to the night
the tent like a pimple on the face
of the mountain her calling
to the sky, drops all night
from broad leaves, the war
poetry of bullfrogs and owls,
the pacific verses of insects
and the haze of the unseen:
lying here on this pillow
i am transfixed like one dying
on the conviction, full of mud
and sweat, that this is what
i must have more of; caroline
there next to me, invincible,
i walked beside her through
the black green corridor of the
dark, pores electric with the
sound of her words:
behold what you are;
may you become what you receive
where i wish you to be: just here,
anointed in spring water before
a congregation of newts and pubescent frogs,
learned in the land to
which you surrendered many times:
learned just in slow and simple things,
no longer in thrall of arcana.
