2020 / poetry / author

LIANNA SCHREIBER

RAPTURE
…

for your lips I come out of shade, reverent
as an Orphic worm
summoned sunside by the pass of Perun —

I crawl my way out from the grave and, disrobing of pergament,
leave my words on your eye’s windowsill.

I kiss my love down bare
into the curl of your eyelashes, into your eyelids, into the bridge
of your nose, the tip of it with its slight upturn. I kiss
each of your cheeks,

bite at their apples, for they are darling, darling —

dearer than honey, than any of the holy oils.

devout I kiss you, my bird, my doom, my ecstasy;
devout and burning

and wanton for the

touch of your glad rain.

WIDE-EYED

…

I throw myself like water, the body plying soft and laughing
to every crevice in the sun-cracked earth;

I throw myself like rivers bending strange
to better kiss the weeping root of willow forests, lurching themselves like strays, netted
in the great roil of their loving;

I throw myself like Holy Fools grown mothen throw the coals of their hearts
at jags of mortal fire;

o, like wood I throw myself, like a child,
making church of every beetle, of every blade of grass
that is without a burdock leaf for shelter;

I throw myself at the world with the full of my wonder. I give and I give and
I try not to tire. I tire:

it is then that the world throws itself back,
raiming me clean in garments of dark wonder, in rich porphyry of black soil — I sleep
cradled in the bosom of my God

on pillows of cornsilk, on sheets as soft as a night-bodied fig;
sleeping I dream myself to wholeness,

replenishing the jug of the thorax

from that buried well a kingdom of horselords
long ago dug

southeast of my sternum.