honey and sting

Getting to Know Each Other

New Mexico and I,
we're a little shy.
Perhaps "diffident" is a better word.
Oh, the daily display is nothing short
of transcendent, a set-piece worthy of Cecil B.:
light pouring down through clouds
over the Sandia mountains this morning,
for example, like Blake's God with a protractor,
the angles clean and precise, as if to say:
"Eat your heart out, children, this is how it's done.
You may now applaud."

And yet, for all the extravagant beauty of light, sky,
mountain, and cloud, it's somehow decorous and serene.
You can't help but be seduced, but you never feel played.

I walked outside last night. I'd forgotten to get the mail.
The full moon hung in the sky.

Nothing here will break me.
But I will quietly break, just the same,
and offer the fissure,
here inside me, to the open sky.

"Hell is proximity without intimacy." Dante