MATIN

MATIN
(a brief telephone conversation from the other side of the world)

Stricken by the binary division of male and female,
last night I burned translucent amber. Sacrifice.
In the air above our heads, an aurora borealis
alive with blue light, the rosiated sky timeless, & of no age.
Solar winds entered our crowns, our last chakra,
we tumbled like leaves across the autumn bed.
Our morning eyelids bathed in red corpuscles
dancing between membrane and cornea.
Reflections on stone, clearer than blood.
The time we didn't have, thick sacramental wine.

Someone said the art of compromise,
not conflict—is the basis of civilization.
Somewhere inside all of this, another story is waiting.
We come into this world innocent
only to be toughened by life's school—
What separates us from ourselves and from each other?
It makes me think this trouble goes deeper than culture.
Someone said, it's the men who suffer most of all—
We wonder why there's so much trouble in the world;
we can't even build a bridge to meet half-way.
We keep diminishing love,
as if love and pain were stillborn Siamese twins.
Guilty beasts rising up from within the self,
we felt bound to each other, and to time;
we became our own worst enemies.

I burned the precious resin more ancient than Man,
because to find a love that endures is rarer still.
In the fire surrounded by fire, on dawn's watered cusp,
your voice is distorted by phone lines—Sunspots.
Satellites, precocious star sounds, the cackle of deep space.
The path of the corona extends to the limits
of the solar system as solar wind.
Each ring of the bell, a matin of the heart,
a prayer wheel and flag for all our tresspasses.
As in the fairy tales, we'll mourn
the obligatory year and a day.
But I can't answer those bells yet—your voice,
as if from the dead, still argues from within.


1991  date? Who is it to? Oleg? Bruce?
rev. 5/92