old sweetnesses, part one

I found this today, from the spring of 2008. I had forgotten how I used to write, only and always an outpouring of a devoted love I can't quite remember, like a favorite dress found in a closet many times too small...

The stirring

For Tim

You are not made of bone or stone but wood.

I can feel your roots as they go down

Into my earth, your heartwood in its slow

Expansion with the running of the sap.

In the hollow of our bellies lie the shadows

Of dim caves carved slowly into streambanks;

There in my recesses where wet leaves

Have drifted richly your tongue a tiny frog

Is quivering. He leaps in miniature,

Disturbing gently the damp grotto. Here

The limbs branching from the living crotch

Are mine where the frog crouches, mine

The soft bank crumbling, the stream pouring

Over pebbles in clear currents my body also

Covered in small skeins of dancing light.

I pool deep green into the curve of you.

There you send down dusty shafts of sun

Through which minute fish your fingertips

Are darting, each flash surprising

The half-mirror of my reflecting surface.

Your mouth touches me like raindrops

Falling on the ferns uncurling sharply

In my heart; down in my soil stirs

The bright insistent thrust of a new shoot.

Our scent is fresh and bitter as a leaf

Rubbed between our fingers. In me you are

A sudden sunwarmed current from upstream

Running gold into my stillness. The frog’s throat

Pulses. The fish dart outward in a burst

Like liquid glass, and your reflection

Shatters into sunlight when he leaps.

Your rain drips from my leaves. In me the sap is

Flowing up to shake out into blossom.

Does it make me sad or only nostalgic, knowing that I would never now write this for another?