Woman to Man
There are days when sun tinges the trees
and leaves come lazying down
against a measure of pure blue
and I feel like reaching up small hands.
But there are days when hands close –
When they shutter themselves, finger by finger
To shelter a mess of shadows -- days
when I am not sure of what I know.
Then, I cannot reach out to you,
Or enter your strange rooms of silence
Walled in by vertical light.
Sometimes I need a totally open space –
An endless field – where darkness can bend down
And scatter like shadows in bright grass;
Where birds thread the blue eye of distance
Drawing their shadows after.
Sometimes I need the woman that is in you.
She will say yes. She will plant a meadow
of light words. Against a deepening evening
she will turn to me and say,
“What do you have hidden in your hands?”
And knowing how hard it can be
To believe that such miracles happen
She will wait for the light to bloom in them
When, petal by petal, they open.
