Utter Grand Complicity

Waiting at the threshold in the fog: peering
through the tiny cracks of log – split
roughly into boards that form the door that
you’re outside of: catching scent of rare meat
roasting and the sweat of bodies making love –
your soul takes in the glow – a red and gold –
a flame – as if whatever you were looking at
were cut and flooding gentle light instead
of blood: you sense that everything’s

a body but cannot quite make it yours:
you crouch there trembling by the bolted
entryway: so ordinary – grey and brown
soft wood, this weathered pine – and none of it
you’d think to say was “mine” – and yet
that feast of meat and flesh and flame inside
that you can smell and sense has an intensity
so troublingly familiar that you can’t mistake it:
beyond this psychic fence that somebody

erected is the recipe you seek: the spirit is
the body and the combination makes you
weak: ah, that’s the trouble: what you can’t
quite hear or speak: the rumbling necessity
of diving in and never coming back: it feels
like an embrace of an unfathomable lack: but
there it is, the rest of you, your orchestrated
self – the final dare – an utter grand
complicity with an extraordinary elsewhere.


.