Epithalamium With A Chorus Of The Heavenly Beasts
We wed in scales, then nudge onshore and gasp
as our fins begin to separate and bend.
We wing above the snail-bred sand. Again
the sun becomes a stub of melted wax.
I promise you a fire that heralds up;
to wear your sadness like a winter mask
of pine boughs. I’ll make my arms a basket
beneath galactic lids that won’t erupt
because in sleep your face emerges, bright
unbodied runner shocked to movement toward
a periscope of stars, where, unadorned,
a monstrous ripple is ours now, both, to fight.
We’ll laugh at coins grandstanding in our palms.
We’ll hurl their metal back to deep hewn mines.
You eat the fruit. Let me choke down the rinds
that burst when you behold them. Like a psalm,
a finch shakes water from its wings, and calls,
“I have so many windblown things to tell you!”
Another finch descends, rushing through
the dimensions of its adobe heart.
Until our songs, drunk, pressurized,
collapse into air, we’ll keep our love
like yogic wisdom of banana slugs—
for I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.
I’ll give you finger bones, my mountain knees.
Sitting up in bed, beneath a treaded
sky, I’ll find you in the dark, the beaded
dark that eats my hands along your body.
Today, in wheaten dreams rolled out I find
the half moon of your eyelash drifting down,
a prism in the speculum that vows
I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.
*Esvie Coemish by way of The Pedestal Magazine. Read more of Coemish's Love Letters in the Seneca Review's "Beyond Category" issue.