The Arch

There is evidently more to soul than Venus, and more to Venus than soul.

-- James Hillman, Anima

***

You are throned in my first shouts,
oh queen of mere beginnings.
So much more comes after that
in the building and the tillage
that I forget the aquamarine
dolor of your first humid sighs.
Marriage leaves you far behind
like a fading, dripping arch—
a fabling archon of salty depths
which every birth requires
and then forgets, or exiles
to the gauzy otherworld
of all I’ve yet to dream.
You are that descending stair
which I fell down in wild,
so desperate love, careening
from surficial knowns
into the blue sweet of
sea raptures deep between
your thighs. Who holds
on to any whit of self
in that wild saline glissade
from wave-height down
to world-collapsing boom?
Yet waking in that other
world abed adrift at sea,
we cannot help but begin
at once to self infinity
with words and names,
recollecting jobs, ex-wives,
unfinished business and real
needs beyond the bed
like a world around the sea.
Thus the bitterness of salt,
those tears of awfulness
and ire, riptides of woe
and upwelling loss
which always tears us
back in two and makes
love taste so bottomless
and utterly undrinkable.
It’s then you step back on
your wave to ebb away
and leave us wondering
what you began, and
proceed to house and
garden like altars or
metaphors of the fading
echo of our first
milky ejaculate shouts.
All love begins down
your mad billows
one rapturous and raging
night: All lovers awake
as from undersea
upon a dazzling beach
fused now to each other
no matter how far that
first big night music
recedes. Your work
completes in that
next day’s first so
gentle and lingering
heraldic kiss, so soft
as if to dream two
futures in the measure
of one shared breath.
Now comes the hard
part, the one that
lasts the mortal reach
of days. Now comes
the difficulty of real
men and women who,
named by that welcoming kiss,
must build their house
of love with blood and
shit for mortar, & pay
mortgage on your ocean’s thrall
til tombs remit the bliss.