Once upon a time, long before the earth was born, you promised you’d turn my sadness into poems, and the poems would turn to light. and that light would be my music. and that music would rise into the winter sky and touch the moon and bring it fire. ah, watch how it settles quietly over the cold, black earth now like a blanket, so warm, warmly — then like a spring, my love will drive you out into the brilliant sun, and make you dance, and make you sing, my love, with my love, I’ll make you sing as the vines hang heavy with fruit across the low mountain valleys and the green-sided hills.

i’ve lately become a nightbird soaring high above the soft moist earth just to taste the purple sweetness in your mouth, just to see the moonlight in your eyes — so now the autumn, now the harvest, can crush me between their fingers, squeezing out my heart for all the world to see.

and the sun can warm my chilling spirit and age will dull my eyes, squeeze, crush, bruise, my face, my arms, dry my hair. ah, but see how i laugh? see how i smile? well, i’m so arrogant, i am.   so arrogant and positively lovely. and like a hunter I will track you down amongst the teeming vines, quietly, relentlessly, until the stones in your heart crumble, sighing, into sand and i lie naked beneath a pale orange moon, smothered in a sea of earth and fire, whispering like     a woman insane — until you close your eyes and sing to me — of pinot noir of chardonnay.