Cigarettes became stale after 30.
My bones were trees
where smoke drifted among them
and I was a mother with strong, soccer player legs,
lifting our children without my muscles shaking,
lifting like gravity does the tides.
Raising our children
like that “Thing” that moves
the objects of Space into place without tension.
Just like that “Thing” granted
the Universe space for creation.
Born as a boy,
I wept into mirrors at my starved physique.
But now I stand like majestic oak
with squirrels pawing up me,
reborn into the body of a woman,
I do not shake.
With deer maidens grazing about me
on the newborn blades of Spring,
I shed my sap.
Is this to weep?
At night, I lay with the wind with you.
. . . Is this to weep?
Across the adobe walls of your thighs,
across the adobe walls of our home
the song of the wind is playing
and as you rise
from the sunlight breast-dew of ocean skins
(O sand dunes affirmed among wind!)
the statues shine in the City of Heaven.
I go on to tell someone later that day,
in a colorful and fruity way,
“I kissed my wife when she awoke this morning.
I'll do it again tomorrow.
Do you know what it means to enter that city
of angels
each morning?”
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