a love poem, august 2013

what I understand of myself
is this:

I learned to never return
to those who swallowed
my innocence
in their darkness, whole. 
and yet I return to you—
sinking in your gray vastness,
your pull of god. 

home of sirens,
you became them,
filling me
with the deepest blue
of the marianas,
crushing me
in the black water
a thousand meters
below the dying reefs,
the dead anemone. 

in summer you drag me
with the heaving breaks of tide
across the broken slipper shells,
cutting my thighs
a hundred tiny times,
and I hold for you nothing
but an enduring, archaic love.

if all I can do
in this life
is end it
within your still-full belly,
I will turn my marrow to cement
and surrender
to you, I will let you pull me
into the dream
that is death.