Drumbeats of Creation

My fingertips are
deep wells in Your body.
That place where passion
shapes longing into form.

Who is the creator here?
Do I sculpt or am I
shaped by Your imagination?
My hands image You
then You compose me
as a poem
or as drops of blood.

The bell ringer
has become the inside of the bell
The drum beats the stick.
Birds nest in my eyes
to give birth to You.

Who is the Goddess
when every flower paints its face
with Your presence?
Who creates thoughts and feelings,
then wears them to be seen?

I am a depth for You
to pray within.

The Magdalene

The Magdalene takes you to Her cave in the sky:

you are taught the scripture of Her body

its starry gaze, its dark blooms

where rooms open to become heavens.

She lays you down in Her,

She invites

and bids you enter.

Mary anoints you.

Mary washes your feet with Her hair.

She leads you into Her bridal chambers,

She teaches you the mystery of poetry

how the holy words are inward and female

and must be dressed to be seen.

Then like a seed too full of the sky

you break open to form a mouth for Her prayers.

She speaks to you like mist and sunlight

Her voice releasing

one delicate frond of passion after another.

She sheds two thousand years of tears for you.

You hold her close not daring to speak

daring only to be human enough.

You hold Her like a bee holds a bloom

gathered intimately around as taste and scent.

She tells you that you are Her Jesus

She holds your hand

reading the pain of your life across its palm

a life spent walking away from the Magdalene

away from the Goddess

until you remembered

until your heart opened at last

like a flower in the cave of Her love.

Love Letters

Her love letters
stay unopened
until you find a poetry
to translate their words.

She writes in green sap
in first light
in the dark blood of passion.
She engraves Her flowers
over moonlight
where hands melt to touch Her.

I write.
Words come flying in
like crows
some are crippled by the light.
Some are hobbled
by a grappling darkness
but they come.

I return Her letters
in bundles of self.
I scratch out a poem
and while it is still bleeding

offer it to Her lips.

Painting: The Unopened Letter. (c) James C. Christensen

www.jameschristensen.com/saintsandangels.html

A Fierce Love

I am addicted
to Your dark flowerings:
Mysteries that can only bloom
under craving hands.
A fierce love that intoxicates
and drinks the wine
of its own substance.
I am Your finding fingers.
We play hide and seek
with our souls.
We mask ourselves
in each others shadows.
We love that wild kind of light
that can be broken down
into taste and feeling;
into sensual blooms.

Image: Radiance. (C) Christine P. Newman

www.pbase.com/eb2005/image/48955593

Thriving

I thrive in You
I flourish as the lips
of Your mouth.
The folded roundness
of Your love has a shape
within me
that I now curl around
as Your own limbs.

There was a time
when I knew
nothing of the Goddess,
and how She lives like a hand
in the glove of being.
I did not flourish
I would sift my life
through a withering mirage.

Then You stole my body
and took it to live in You.
I slipped easily
into Your secret places.
Gardens of delight
where both of us
thrive.

Near & Far

We part like waves
that break still joined at the hip.
I become Your mouth
while You remain
this molten language of blood.
We have to keep moving in and out
of this nearness and distance
to make room for speech.
Not a talking, but the sound of desire
as it sings in the throat of an infinite longing.
The prayer of one hand beseeching another
to clasp where its fingers ask and open.
The connected and adjacent speech
of this body of our love
as it turns this way and that to make words
for the one heart to utter.

~~

Body Language IX
by Alfred Gockel

www.art.com/.../sp--A/Body_Language_IX.htm

Painting You

I know how to paint You,
how to make myself a color
to be melted down
in the bloods cloudy cauldron
until I become sheer enough
to be Your image.

I have no artistry
I simply supply the vessels
of light and dark
with their open mouths
of desire
where Your presence
can be mixed.

I know how to paint You,
how to be a canvas
so soaked through
with heavy tones and textures
that its fabric falls apart
painting a shadow
of Your beauty.

~~

Chinese Painting On Xuan Pape-Nude Beauty W/Tiger 27"Lx27"W

chinesepaintingonlineartgallery.com/index.php...

A Melt of Intimacy

We dance together
in-between the thought of bodies:
An evaporation of beauty into passion
that reappears
as a single bloom of lust.
This equation of flesh and breath
becomes a flow of adoration
a sexual prayer for hands to drown within.
Water and heat create a tongue
that dissolves and shapes dreams
with a labile language of love.
We lay folded into each other
like wet towels by a pool of stars.
There is a heaviness
that we feel deeply like air.
There is a ribbed bud of ecstasy
that tastes the void.

Something Left

I have something left to give You.
I have this deep space
where You planted darkness
like a seed. A germ of the sun
hidden in my long night.
I have this depth
that was born to wait
like soil waits to be turned over.
That is what I have left
and just what it is,
what can be found
in this crushed cosmos
of self
You alone can discover
as you plunge fingers
of light
into my earth
with the ravishing patience
of loveseeking its own face.

Night Flights

I am carried like a song
in a nightingales mouth.
Lifted over Your sensuality
trailing feathers of darkness.

The moment is a crucible
an arcane ecstasy
squeezed through
a thousand channels
of desire.

I am spread like honey
over honey
melted into a language
only the alchemy of taste
can talk of
as it dissolves.

And though it is dark,
though the night is very deep
you thrill me:
You move me like a tongue
in a songbirds mouth-

a throated sky
where clouds speak
and raindrops learn
the meaning of tears.

Flow

The night has a skin
as deep as the ocean
for those who dive into themselves.
If I lay still
and naked of thought
I become a shell
for Your waves.
A memory of the future
that must be recalled
out of the past.
If I sometimes leak being
over the rim of You
it is because
I am a blind edge
of the sea.
I must flow
like water
being tipped out
of a shell
deep within Your ocean
or pour like the night
out of its hollowness
as a light inside
the flow of us.

Who Speaks?

What is real?
This hand I hold up in the dark
is Your mirror
I see You as real as light.
I am naked
You are naked
but whether there is less
or more of me--I cannot say.

This body is as real as Your breath
this flesh as empty as my hands
but I hold You
I feel Your desire to be held.
I tremble where You reach.

What is my heart saying?
Does it chime Your presence
or mine?
What reality clasps me to its breast
afraid to speak
least one of us is missing?
I lift Your dress
with words and poetry
but Your nails rip my soul
to shreds.

Why do you say Yourself
so rapturously in me?
Your limbs grip,
Your mouth crushes essence
into wine
as we both struggle together
wanting to speak beyond two
but failing even
to speak for ourselves.

If I or You are unreal
who moans to be killed
or brought to a climax
like meat to the fire?
Who calls my name
so sweetly
as if it were
the very taste of love?