sunday morning (with apologies to wallace stevens, dylan thomas, and w.b. yeats)

It was a sacred space and a profane, holy and wholly of this world. It was Adam and maiden, the Garden and the Fall. It was bells in steeples and waxy smell of snuffed sacramental candles. It was comfort and joy, fear and lust, virtue and sin and swelling of music over the heart’s membrane. It was touching tongues and touching souls. It was you and me, it was an us, the beginning of a brand-new Us with all the pain and pleasure that entailed. It was my dark heart, your warm arms, your declaration clear and brave and not at all dramatic—but yes, it was drama, too, no doubt about that, all the risings and fallings of a complicated plot. O man who found me who I found, o body swayed to music how could I tell the dancer from that dance of tangled limbs, that warm and smarmy swarm of lips and fingers, that Dylan Thomas Wales of a preternatural supernatural all-too-natural sort and sorted?

It was coffee and oats, cream and sugar, yin and yang, on and off. It was rain, gentle enough to break your heart. It was me--you--an us that did not yet exist and how could it though now it seems (illusionary brain!) it always had been and never was. These two, these rueful soldiers limping along the road, wondering when Damascus would call us up and lightning strike. Sunday morning was new, was true. Was me. Was you.