Who Loves to Lie with Me

“Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me
And tune his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
Come hither…”

As You Like It, II.v.1-5

Seems like fantasy to you, I bet: but
it’s reality to me: we sneeze and shoo –
ah-choo! – our lives into a rushing brook
so burbling, fast and freely undermining
that we barely know we’re wet before
we’ve drowned: oh, not to die, but to belie

the facts, and buy the fictions that we’ve
got a past and present and a future:
everything appears to stream from backs
to fronts, but we’re a dunce if we believe it –
saturated with the neutering effects
of freezing water, we don’t know the truth

it slaughters: there’s a grassy ground –
a bank above to boost to – verdant and as
dry as June that we have only to climb up to,
to resume a sunny unimpeded bliss. But
you, my sprite, my light – you’ve caught
a glimpse of that soft brightness overhead,

and sometimes from your dreamy seaweed
bed you come to lie with me atop
the greenness of eternity – and then we
wrestle bawdily and naughtily upon its soft
and rippling vegetable sensual extremity:
and you cannot go back, although you do:

that is, it seems like fantasy again, to you,
though not to me. But you will dream again,
my little pea, and then you’ll pop up
to the green anew and roll around
and see and hear and smell and taste
and chew and be the ecstasy.

.