Love in the Time of Revolution

Listen, I know you are lonely.

I can see it in the way your hair curls down

over your forehead, the slump of your shoulders

as you bend to take a hit from the bong

you spent the weekend cleaning like a pistol.

And it takes the night being ravenous,

rejections at the bar,

and you being shitfaced to admit

through bloated eyes that you are human,

            just wanting to be held

by a woman who loves you.

Believe me, nothing inside the body is ever quiet:

the heart whispers in its sleep, even

when the lips are closed. Blood chases itself

like a child down a labyrinth of veins,

like the water that recycles itself

through the lakes and marinas in Montana—

some processes can’t end. Even after love

the body keeps stretching, is filled with things

that move. My hairs stand on their own at the sight

of a moth, paddling circles around the foam

in a single unwashed bowl in the sink.

~

To love

           you say

                      It will happen on its own,

like drops of rain making a map on the window

or a baby, suddenly aware

           of its hands, exploring the freedom

of a fist.

Know that even as you read this you are envied

by the cholla, who, if it could think, would

believe that we can touch each other

without pain. I won’t lie—

you cut up the San Pedro, boiled it into a soup,

strained the needles from the meat

and called it medicine.

We drove for hours and I recalled

reading how in three hundred years

if it’s left untouched, the cactus will

finally show its bones.

We drank at noon,

the sun eyeballed us with suspicion,

knowing we have so much more choice

in how we rise and fall. I felt nothing

           but jealousy for the falcon, that

                      talking spirit that would not

abandon the sky, committed four hours

to tracing its name on the open palm of blue

so someone would know it was there.

~

Sometimes voice is not enough. Sometimes

a word falls from us like a boulder and rolls unnoticed

until it is dust. I must say I tried.

I felt nothing but

           the fingers of the evening resting

on my cheeks, the needles catching

on my heel and staying

like the ghost of a childhood bog.

You left us in the circle

around the camp where the cacti danced

and died, shaking their skeletal knees

at the mountain.

What stories did they have to tell?

Nothing quite like your move to La Paz,

how in leaving you thought you would never see

Fedra again. How you loved her

without knowing her, and then she was gone.

That memory still moist

on your lips,

you met a friend of a friend during an uprising

and you found her in a city of 4,000—

you locked eyes. You kissed. You exchanged numbers

but never called her, that opportunity missed

like a train being swallowed

into a deep winter sunset.