Root and Branch

This one diffused and startled moment

When the light drifts on the current,

And you are far away, but emphatically connected,

Because these gardens of memory grow within me,

Tendrils scrolling through the low crumbling stones,

Great swaying trees, evergreen monuments to the endless words,

Branching from one another, spoken and not, the understandings,

The mis-taken, the branches that are bare fruitless lines

Of what we failed to say,

Whole hillsides of rolling wildgrass faces, voices, strays,

Deep roots unseen and unsuspected, coiling within and into

One another, moments into each other, hours that tap wellspringing

Years and nights and seconds,

In the rich pungent soil of me,

The wet

Pooling in the cupped loam,

The wet of your kisses, of your tears, the wet between your legs,

The mingled wet of sweat and the salt trace of pure body, de-composed,

The elemental grains of decay and life, dust impregnated with nourishment,

The unending thirst for you, the gravity and the reaching, root and branch.

You are far away, but emphatically connected, you are the root and the branch,

My garden is overgrown with you.

In these moments, as the light ebbs, and my wakefulness

Is the low berm of heavy stones crumbling at my feet,

The taste of your soil lingers, the grains and the wet,

The cup of the belly swells in the starving dark,

The soil slowly mingles memory with longing

And nourishes improbably,

The autumnal garden made to bloom again.