For a long time I was trying to write a poem
about doing massage work.
And I came up against the paradox
which was that the person who does massage
is a nonverbal person.
She would not speak she had nothing
to say she just liked to do it.
And I wrestled with this for months, maybe two years,
trying to find the way into this poem
because it means a great deal to me.
It's a form of worship to me.
And I wanted to speak about it.
But I couldn't until I realized that she is nonverbal.
And I had to write a persona poem so to speak.
The poet had to write what the poet thought
the masseuse was going to say.
"So the Masseuse".
Always an angel rises from the figure, naked and safe
between my towels as before taboo.
It's why I close my eyes.
A smell precedes him as the heart fills from his bowl.
I bow down to the riddle of the ear.
Its embryonic swirl nested with nodes
that calm the uncurled spine, a maypole among organs.
Each day, a stranger or almost crosses my heart
to die from the unsayable into the thickened beating
of those wings and we are shy.
Or frightened, as with clothes on we
forget abysmally what heaven shares with death.
What gypsy vowels unshackled from the lips rush
the impenetrable mind and the atlas
clicks in my trowel hands.
Crocuses on the threshold south side then and now.
It goes on like an egret scaling the unruly bands of atmosphere
we have agreed on by my palms, erratic longing of the flesh
to dry.
Toes crack, hips soften and the spine,
a seaweed in the shallow spool undulates
lights like a musical string by the struck note,
helpless with harmonics.
Rock, cradle the perceptible scar
of the compass, sensible stigma and a poised blind
of trust angling for reentry and the rain,
the wind across its face like minnows
and the dark of love schooling the light will speak to you
and you will walk home, dizzy, grazed by the gloaming
and the just illumined stars.