Holy Redeemer

When I close my eyes, all I see is you. Face bare against the grass. Body languid.

When She looked closer, there wasn’t anything that could have hid the way they found one another. The tree themselves had been whispering for days, begging in hushed voices for them to come closer. Closer, come closer,

They beckoned. Hang from our branches, eat from our fruit. “Bear fruit, and multiply.”

Each apple winding its way through the leaves is like a map of time, with no beginning or end. The flesh, so ripe, so sweet, circular, barely believable. gleaming with unfamiliar worlds. Her face, an apple. To multiply, to eat.

Those words ring bitter in my mouth; poisoned, I spit out the seeds. The taste no longer is sweet.

We swallowed our own tails, orobos. The flesh, so ripe, so sweet, circular, barely believable.

If I could chase your scales, I would chase them for days, over these rivers, mountains that unfold when we touch them, rise again at the slightest word. From the words that tumble out of your mouth, all things were birthed to light. When she spoke, the angels leaned down from the tangled limbs of the orchards and beckoned, crooked fingers, laughed at each other with their heads bowed down, straining to listen.

“Oh God, break the teeth in their mouths, tear out the fangs of the young Lion, O Lord!”

To tear from one another,

Breath breaking at the dawn. Lips against lip, parting mouths, your skin against mine. We fit together like the bends of the rivers when they dare to meet, at either edge of the garden. It flows, from one place to the next, tumbling over itself in a roar that rises and falls without any mouth to catch the last drop. Trickling over the rocks in a caress that edge and ebbs with the same slow movements of a lovers arm, finger, sweet touch, in each dark place that rises, and each liquid fall.

“Let them vanish like the water that runs away; when he aims his arrow, let him be blunted.”

The piercing strike rang out through the garden. They ran besides each other like deer, stalking their way through the meadows grasses, yellow, burnt and left behind in the warmth of a day rolling out into a night blackened by the blaze of a thousand empty stars. A thousand watching eyes.

Tearing at the flesh, Eve and Lilith, two bodies in a mind condemned to be left behind.

To listen to them was certain death.

“Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime, like the stillborn child who never sees the sun.”

Traffic lights burn out, one by one. In the haze of another life, we join, spiraling, one star reaching out from the next, galaxies rising and falling again, born in another passage, another time. I flew through the womb only to find you on the other side. Where nothing is sacred. We run the streets in vehicles leaking gas. The floor of the garden is paved, asphalt bitter deep and grey, it chokes my lungs, stings. I buy the fruit at the grocery store, where fluorescence beams down on me. In my pocket, last remnanet of you. I can feel it, my fingers tracing the outline, running over the lines of the heart. Inside there's nothing. No time to take a picture, to fill the locket sized shape. Here, clothing hangs too loose, too tight. If there is a God, surely she is a woman, because I can feel her pain, when the earth is covered like this. To hid inside a womans skin is to live the life of a snake, shedding again, again, and again. To hid in another womans skin is only temporary relief. And what of it?

When She looked closer, there wasn’t anything that could have hid the way they found one another. The tree themselves had been whispering for days, begging in hushed voices for them to come closer. Closer, come closer,

They beckoned. Hang from our branches, eat from our fruit. “Bear fruit, and multiply.”

I died besides you in my dreams before. Your eyes held the reflection of a falling star. We have met in many lifetimes, not not like this. Not in two forms of the same flesh. Even in this body, in this time, I have craved you. Here where no light shines