you were spoken of

This is not a stretching toward great work.
That can wait until green apples are hung
from branches in easy sunlight this summer.
Yes, that's the best thing about the future --
it holds great work redolent with dewy musk.

This is a stretching sideways toward you.
Or at least toward the fruit of other saying.
Worlds of crystal growth and night written
to hold the spell of your quiet consciousness,
to hold every contour of your alarming smile.
And capture my longing to hear your voice
drift through worlds made of my dark words.

You have brought the very best kind of joy --
one that is tortured with pinpricks of sadness.
Is that how a crystal begins to grow at night?...
through accretions of groaning liminal layers?
You have inspired a gleaming movement
from themeless being into solid substance.
Well, "solid" is too strong a spoken word.
Let's call it instead a direction for writing.

Oh, how I love those moments when I see you,
sitting there made out of my reaching language.

It is such a boon to living that a thought hides,
secluded perfectly behind the silk of far saying.
Death will not erase lines made of such longing.
You would, of course, look askance at all this.
That is why I scatter lines to deathless hours.
Let each one be a seed to bring a tear of crystal
into this or some equivocal world for great lasting.

So...this is just a summing up before stretching
toward a later, different work of summer verses.
Then a pruning away of myself from apple limbs
will let new green fruit begin to warm and flourish.
A ripening of words open to a different impossible.

Now, I take this silk scarf of sea-flecked blue,
sleeping mauve, soft-dreamng golden weave
and wrap it around your spoken-for shoulders,
shoulders covered with a glory of prophetic hair.
I have wrapped a scarf of my sad-joyful words
around you so carefully you never even knew it.