Swimming in the True Light
http://www.maverickmagazine.com/articles/4/1/Swimming-in-the-True-Light-/Page1.html
Jefferson Adams
Jefferson Adams is a freelance writer living in San Francisco. His
poems, essays, and photographs have appeared in Antioch Review, Blue
Mesa Review, CALIBAN, Hayden's Ferry Review, Huffington Post, the
Mississippi Review, and Slate among others.
By Jefferson Adams
Published on 10/1/1999
We began in the scarlet burn
With fire's tortured logic
Sucking water from our bones.
With fire's tortured logic
Sucking water from our bones.
We began in the scarlet burn
With fire's tortured logic
Sucking water from our bones.
What evaporated from our core
Fell back as the water
We coveted, to the landscape
We forgot we were part of.
So the hidden pools
We wandered into at dusk
Became, not union, not
Re-union, but escape
Into ourselves.
The shy assertion of your breasts
In the water, not a return
To what I was part of, but a flight
Both toward and away from
Something wholly other.
Fear. Desire.
The contradictions frighten me.
Though I have lied
And accepted lies
With the best of them
I want most, fear most of all
To return to what I most wholly am:
The man I can least accept.
Watching your naked body
Create and destroy this postcard
Moment, with its life and death
Colors of sunset, and chaos
I swear I could be shot dead
Right this minute
And be happy.
But that's not what this is about.
This is about love.
About the bite I want to take
Out of everything.
Before it eats me first.
Copyright © Jefferson Adams, 1999. All Rights Reserved.
With fire's tortured logic
Sucking water from our bones.
What evaporated from our core
Fell back as the water
We coveted, to the landscape
We forgot we were part of.
So the hidden pools
We wandered into at dusk
Became, not union, not
Re-union, but escape
Into ourselves.
The shy assertion of your breasts
In the water, not a return
To what I was part of, but a flight
Both toward and away from
Something wholly other.
Fear. Desire.
The contradictions frighten me.
Though I have lied
And accepted lies
With the best of them
I want most, fear most of all
To return to what I most wholly am:
The man I can least accept.
Watching your naked body
Create and destroy this postcard
Moment, with its life and death
Colors of sunset, and chaos
I swear I could be shot dead
Right this minute
And be happy.
But that's not what this is about.
This is about love.
About the bite I want to take
Out of everything.
Before it eats me first.
Copyright © Jefferson Adams, 1999. All Rights Reserved.