A Dialogue of the Soul

You used to prowl outside
my bedroom window, scuttling
icy rungs to get near,
rapping lightly, your cold breath
expiring against the cracked pane.
Let me in. Don’t let me freeze out here.
I bought a padlock,
hid under a torn green blanket,
behind stone fences of desire.

And when I went out
I checked up and down the stairwell
for shadows of you, peered
distances to make out the shape
of you coming towards me
listened like an Indian
for any sound of you
saying my name
with your quiet and certain voice.
All fear is love quantified, expressed
As a fraction of the lies we tell.

I didn't want to be caught
running Maine roads in June,
terrified I would see you beneath
the next tree,
standing frozen in the brown lawn
of a big white house, unexpected as a kiss.
I dreamt you at Issykul trailing
me on a bicycle. I stayed,
darling, for your birthday
got you Dostoevsky and a shirt
because you said love shouldn't hurt.

I loved you like the first snow
in November,
wept into Chinese lakes
when you vanished into a new life.
Sampled poison
when I heard you were happy
and more beautiful than anyone remembered.

Souls fall to earth
because they are ambitious.
After all,
they have seen God and rebellious
ones think there must be more.
For what's hell if not the possibility
that god is all there is?
The final irony is his.

You were the forgetting of higher love,
calling me downward to a flightless world:
Your narrow eyes, the proof of why souls
having loved the human way
cannot rise again;
your touch, your kiss and coils,
why they forget their Paradise
and end as exiles to the truth
of our beginnings.