Sonnet L'Abbe

Offering

The vocabulary of desire
is incomplete, a word is missing.

My tongue searches
for your body in language
and finds you in every word.

I thought this was a small thing, a stone
in the palm I could offer you,
My body in darkness a simple gift
as casual as a pebble.
As if touching were easier than speaking,
as if this poem did not prove you
inside me already, as if asking
meant I still had the power to invite.

But you make me aware of breathing,
of the awesome fact
that each particle of air
has been taken at least once
into every lung.
Suddenly I have no boundaries
and to kiss you seems to drink up the sky,
slip it from my tongue into your mouth.

Our bodies just our hearts' clothing,
and I came to you so shabbily dressed.
Maybe I thought that for one night
I could wear your beauty through closeness
and for a few hours believe myself
splendidly arrayed.

But you know all the lyrics
to rejection.
My body, your exquisite voice's
shattered glass.



A Lesson from the leach

"come down. You are a potter's son"

There is a hierarchy of shape.
We are ever inside systems, neutral elusive
but from the stars' slow progress we can prove
ellipses know something we have yet to learn.

The potter suspects a code, a cryptic so well kept
our gathered remnants shout it,
a liquid, public skeleton
spilled off the porcelain lips of all perfection,
but you could listen your whole life
and never hear, as you must this language of land,
with your hands

The secret of beauty is all around us.
We walk over it, staining our soles with earth

Books might try to mould a curve, a sturdy foot,
but words cannot teach texture.
A vase, A vessel, is more perfect then geometry.
Realize this: a circle is describable.

Weight is learned by holding, feeling.
the exact urgency of the earth as it asks
for its body back.
The shape of the blur orb's longing
thrown again and again, subtle as trust,
little planets born from the spinning wheel.
The wheel knows the centrifugal mind
of the universe, returning perpetually to form.

A poem about pots is colour to the blind.
The theory of mine hold water.