496 Steps with a Sapphire Butterfly

My feet know this path
My eyes, these woods
My way so familiar
My presence is hardly needed

I glance at you fleetingly
(because I am busy, thinking)
Only long enough to elide past you
With a half-formed ‘oh yes, that’ (thinking, busy)
Thinking we have only chanced together
(because I am busy, ‘ah, yes, this’)
But you would have us dance together

I am charmed at first
Then somewhat alarmed
You tangle me I fall
Out of rhythm with myself
I am out of step on my own path
Disjointed, fumbling, stumbling into
A new dance I don’t understand
The partnership of the half-formed
‘yes, oh yes, this is what I was made for
Why you are here with me and I with you’
You weave yourself around me, fleetingly,
Never quite with me never quite leaving me
At last I catch your rhythms
I fall into the slow . . . slow . . .
Quick-quick-slow sliding gliding tango
Down a path my feet once knew
My way, now remembered, so familiar
A presence fills the woods and I embrace
Without question the chances of my body
Though I am whole unto myself
Yet do I choose to open
My soul to you my heart
To your heart

Anyone walking toward me
On the path would see
Only a woman, so familiar
A woman hardly needed.
They do not see Psyche
And her sapphire butterfly
Dancing in the August woods.

Kukulkan

At the mouth of the well of Itza
I sing to Chac and dance alone
On Kukulkan face and arms and
Breasts upthrust as the feathers of
His fingers tease me I close my eyes
Against his groans filling the valley
Spilling beyond the little snakes of
My hair writhing as my jaguar feet
Seek their rhythms I am wet
My nipples pebbled against his breath
Spinning red to white to black to yellow
My skin slicked with his sighs my throat
Raw and open at the mouth of the well of Itza
I would follow him into the cenote
Become limestone for his quarrying hands
And the whispering frogs would
Slake their thirst in our puddles.

PRISM

I
was
whole
before
you
wore yourself
into me
before you
fractured my
seamless surfaces
before you
stained me
like cathedral glass
beautifully broken
with light
but now you
are gone I am
opaque and shattered
my pieces no longer fit
and I cannot put
myself back as
I
was
whole
before
you