My lover is a forest

My lover is a forest with rough tree-bark palms, each finger a tiny cone.
The river is warm blood and iron. I taste spruce resin, his skin is sticky honey. When he sleeps, the corner of his eye leaks birch sap, sweet tears – I don’t know what he dreams of, what he grieves for. The bear or bird, the ugly ones that come with greed and ax. Dream-deep, he doesn’t stir, not even when I drink his tear, so thirsty, yearning like skeleton woman, singing meat on bone, thirsty for the love alive in birch sap.

His body is fir, strong spine rising, looking up and fed by light. And the moon clings to the tip of his head, her bone body opening above him. The night keeps the secrets of lovemaking, of moon and fir, how he bows down to her always, giving his root and tree marrow. He is the offering and she glows with madness in the love for him.
Dawn smells of cedar, in the after-light of the night’s lovemaking, his moss hair moist and luminous, the earth tender, slow, sleepy.

He’ll find me in a dream of juniper, a day when I grieve for pine and home. I’ll know it’s him when I smell him, when I’ll peel off his shoes and find roots instead of foot-soles. When I’ll comb his hair of moss, I know it’s him and what he’s lost, when I kiss him for the first time I’ll taste pine oil, wild lips of raspberry.
For him, I become a body of water, spring or river, I’ll flow through his forest body
carving rock
my love dancing him back to the sea.