Confirmations (Orphic Love)

I

Neither heart wanders, but rises and swells
From no hidden source tho undivined
No mystery that we first cling and divide
Fed from that contact where first love dwells
Carrion contact-- sounding word upon word 
Rhyming consubstantial, cell upon cell
Within a star from which no breath fell
But cleft catalyst to form that form be heard.
Smooth body belled with soundings faint
Swing wild against this tower which holds
Its beams about your rocking weight
Abandoned ropes with no need of hands
Dance in that frequency where structure folds
Falls beyond wreckage into architectures of chance.

 
II

Constructions of the actual, like the hornet’s sting
Felt, its electric contact circuitous as mine,
As this hand against this wounded thigh:
Discipline of touch --of not touching
Precipitous as cold glass, wet against the palm
Or the dark sap welling from the heart’s inner rings.
A world of insects, teardrop bodies on razor wings
Crowding the open wound, toward its sweetness drawn
Defining construction as that which holds inward
The framing of a life that makes its outward shape
An absolute tension drawn through the smallest word.
Fruit gone black beneath the tree, the hornet seized
By thickened blood hardening, which heals itself
Drawn up through spidered roots to trembling leaves.

 
III   

Blossom of blood unfold yourself in time
Open to air, well crystalline and quickened
At that breach which itself cannot rend
But draws you up, source of movement and rhyme.
Unfaithful I press you on, splitting the shaft
Coaxial, turn wheels at which the organ grinds
Unwholesome, this ellipsis of the mind
Lapsed beyond the movement to the craft.
Clumsy poet, who names before seeing
The wheel within the wheel which turns
The tree toward light is first a turning
Its accidental substance more than architecture
Tongue of fire in which its branches burn
Pulsing word whose shape roots deep and sure.
 
 

IV

Enworded thought which follows sound
Not of our tongue tho flames of it descend
Over scorched grasses, fields spread blackened,
Your quickened seed breaks on stony ground,
Unpunctuated as this crevecoeure
Ringing without rising, a verb unnouned
Break! Break upon this stony ground.
Form disassembled, broken to restore
These indefinite constructions of love.
‘We have given our hearts away,’ power
Prodigally spent, rising now to air above
Trembling in that rounded tone of fire
Not consumed but burst, a sudden bower
Wheeling petals tripping free and unsired.