Sumerian Love Song - Norwood

What god or priest could have known
that the tree of life and sleep is a woman?
The sage beneath her branches could scarcely
command the secret from the world.
So soft and sour the lotus fruit
and the nightmares that they bring me -
I, unrequited lover, sorrowful like a child,
am innocent. A temple’s on the rise.

Pray – for me,
you priests of dark Inanna.
Sold for gain
are the votives that you make.
I see my paradise every day
unlike your congregation,
but like your congregation,
I’ll never, ever, touch it.

I wait for a paradise
that will never happen.
Infinite in the future
she’ll feel what I do.
Both spheres,
radii unending,
we’ll transect infinitely
spiral indefinitely
and be each other.
The curve of her cheek,
the lines of her shoulders,
these are already segments
of that impossible curve…
the bricks of a holy temple.

I feel
so long -
so hard -
pinnacle.
I stand
across
ages -
difficult.
Her form
my God!
my mind
integrates.
I stand
across
rose stem
crucified.
In the desert
there’s a ziggurat –
a monument –
I built it in my mind.

Something, maybe something
will ripple out the pond of her
and worlds will coalesce
from something pitiful.
Water lilies float upon
some celestial current where I
realize the dangers of the
mind I’ve taken towards her…

Someday, someday,
her copper kisses
encounter my cheek like
blades of grass beneath the
tender charms of an open finger -
be merciful to the
snail feeding on a rose stem.
The cicadas toll while I
scream and plead and bend beneath
the answer in the clothes she wears.
Don’t lay bricks if you don’t want a temple.

-BTN, Sept. '08
--

“Nothing quite takes the taste out of peanut butter like unrequited love…”
- Charlie Brown