I Was Unnamed

Our hidden love is wilder than we know
A let out breath of evergreen and spruce
We cannot hold, we could not ever hold
Before I was your love, I was that loose
And captivating dark, I was unnamed
I was the shake of fur on shaggy buttes
And rivers swollen with the sheeting rains
And I have been the valleys that were drowned
And I have been the mountain that remains
As brown and certain as a muddy mound
That lived its lifetime in a rocky brook
Before I was your love, we were the ground
Where through the heated centuries we shook
Beneath life’s smoky, undulating plume
Watched men like starfish spinning in the soot
Where life throws up its colors in a bloom
And earth will take their ashes back again
Each certain that his time has come too soon
But how we can forget these things, my friend
Beneath the clanging changing of the hour
Where clambering word over word, and hand over hand
In endless search of permanence and power
In hurry as if the throne were never far away
We trample over perfect, blazing flowers
I’m always on the run and I hate copy paste for god’s sake
The glinting willows stop me where I stand
I can remember long forgotten names
I can remember stretching wide my hands
To summon something sentient and strange
Our fire beating back the dark, we call
All human only this side of the change
From something into something else
I fall into the space between their names.
The age of mountains, the age of waterfalls
Must flood our human frames, the age
Of oceans drown the sound of clocks in singing whales
The dreamer turns the page
There, on the evening shore, we stop to talk
Where crabs bend their machinery to pray
The moonlight carving faces in the rock
The city’s cloak of noises falls away
The ocean tumbles, tossing in its bed
I hear its fiery waves
I taste its spray
I touch your fiery cheek, I taste the red
Of our lives' rivers, singing as they go
To meet the midnight sea where they were bred
Colossal tideline, generous and slow
Our hidden love is wilder than we know