Cleopatra, Judas, and a Woodpecker

pine trees at midnight –
a darkness hiding
what I want

 . . . and books in the bedsheets. It is logistical and comforting to feel words at my fingertips when sleep becomes indented.

With eyes closed, the restriction of “either – or” tassels out to “yes – and.” A slow boat up the Nile from Aswan High Dam kept me physically between the two banks of presence. Yet history can press in and lure one beyond the papyrus sway towards the expansive desert throne of the ancient everything. So, it's like that: a drift between there and here on the way to the Red Sea.

The softest pink ahead of sunrise. Coming out of the woods I could hold the morning moon in the left hand and my Sunday God in the right. I talked it over with Judas and decided that I want the kiss of annihilation.

Predawn air crackles in my chest but returns to freedom as virginal utterance, an ejaculation of unadulterated life. It disappears accordingly but I keep watching because as long as I am alive, I know what comes next.

A woodpecker breaks the glassy silence. I adore his echo and give praise. In me, kneeling before desire is a certain equality – a non-dual union of reverence and correspondence. One must be present to win.

In all of this, I am not heedless. But I am knowing myself in the discovery of the peace that has always been. One must step fully in: to winter, to history, to mistakes, to love, to betrayal, to forgiveness and most of all, into who one is. Goddess of the Nile. A beguiler of Christ. The unbidden monk, tapping out his sermon on the old oak as dawn has her way . . .