River love

What do we mean, then, you and I?
You say you dreamed
of me, I dreamed of you.
That’s true, at least. I dreamed your sinews,
hard cords, as your arms stretched,
the skin hiding the power beneath.
I dreamed your hair, silky,
smoother and softer than cat’s fur,
each hair a thread leading
through the labyrinth, leading me,
pulse pounding, heart jumping.
I reach for you, I lean
to be held, your muscles
taut, the skin hiding the power beneath,
like lake water rippling
as the wind moves towards
the waterfall, the flow, irresistible, the
long suck of the current: underwater jungle.

I’m not writing as easily as usual at the moment. I’m lacking inspiration. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s that life is busy, maybe it’s because I’m doing a project outside of these prompts. I don’t know. It was a push to get something down tonight, and I ended up using a form.

You’ve heard of a Golden Shovel poem? Well, this is, strictly speaking, a Jade Shovel. I stole the line end words from Jade Li’s poem, posted on dVerse tonight. This is for the dVerse open link night, too.

Is this it?

…and even if this is it,
is it a tragedy? Or is
this comedy – the
thing we call a burden
might be the inevitability of
living some kind of life,
to wake each morning to
daylight, work and coffee, to be
one small life among the many
who have lived down through long ages
without a storyline, or plot, without
a script, just hearing, seeing,
sensing all the stimuli of the
world, and keeping on until the end,
second, minute, hour, all of
those messy, gorgeous shards of time…

I’ve been wanting to write a Golden Shovel poem for a while now, and this seemed like a good opportunity. Of course, if you go back to the original, you will realise that this can be a beautiful, amazing thing in the hands of a skilled poet. In my defence, he chose a poem that didn’t have many “is”s and “of”s to put at the end of lines…

This is for Jilly’s month of Unreason, and the Jim Harrison quote is – of course –

“it is the burden of life to be many ages without seeing the end of time”