Incantations of Intimacy

How I cry out to touch
where expression of it is only there in the taking.

When longing was rich,
how longed for I was,
but was that the tension of opposites we call love
or merely the abstraction of desire?
How freely I would come to you in the grove
that you were entertained
as I learnt the confines of the unconditional.

Is love, then, mere trinket,
a rare but never unique union of matter,
or is it no more than corporeal flamboyance?

I have yearned landscape every bit as much as body,
indeed, I see them as one:
the laboured hillside arcing back-worn into the swirling mist:
the oil-black tarn abbreviating the moor-land:
the wind-bent blackthorn so far from the bloodied brow.
All these pulling down the sky
to whisper strange incantations of intimacy
that here perhaps might be the quietude of forgetfulness.

Then also the hawk or crow
or other carrion weighed against indifference,
screeching the epiphany,
devouring the profanities of separation.
These winged scholars
bring me wisdom and learning
beyond reach of frail mortality.
Then is it there that needs we must exist?

Oh, strange friend, I have bowed to thy feet in the bleeding
or downed the sacrament with lusty pleasure
that once again the sun might treasure our bodies
or melt us down to earth.
Yet how versed we are in resistance,
how studied against the invisible
that angels be denied the avalanche of being.

So then, I shall stand proud upon the snowfield
and await the thaw
or be buried in the waiting.