Work Text:
Mister Tom Eliot, famous dead Terran,
would've loved Vulcan:
such tightly held feeling,
no springtime, no rain,
no April-bred lilacs,
forcing cruel feeling, breaking
open the heart. (The flesh.)
Only
the shadow of this red rock:
fear in a handful of dust. Fear,
my companion on the winding
road to (Gethsemane) Selaya. Fear
of my heart, shattered without
you. Fear of your heart, fickle
and strange. Best I pluck mine out
before you can. Best it stay here atop
the mountain with no snow-
capped peak, no melting rush
of water, no springtime thaw.
Alas, I am
too human for the trick to work.
And our selves, entangled at the quantum
level snap back together, distance
closed. Encased in ice, I vow
I'll remain safe, aloof,
fixed in my frozen state,
away from Vulcan's suns,
here in the cold of space. Yet you —
I'd sunk the knowledge far below
the rain-starved earth — you are the sun
that thaws, the spring that brings
the melt, the bloom, the painful burst of bud
from all around. Within. A pain that's sweet.
That causes want.
(I do not want
to want you any more.) And yet
I thirst. Far from the desert, still I yearn
for the grace that water brings.
The coldest water, newest: fresh
from changing state, water that remembers
being snow. (How I wanted to freeze over.)
I crave the absolution: to plunge my face,
the cold, its burn, the loss of air and light
and life and then — return.
To air, to sun,
to life, to warmth, to you. Rivers rush within
my veins, illogical, alive. Your hand in mine,
your mind alight—
I am aflood.
The very things I fled subsume me. I gulp
them down with open heart. Your fingers,
warm, so tight on mine. I cling and do not
break, roots seeking purchase, drinking
in this light, this life, your eyes, your touch,
my pounding heart. A freshet tumbling
back where I belong. A cascade surging
back to wild life. The peace which passeth
understanding. Riotous. I know it now.
And will not lose
this simple feeling.