DANDEMONIUM

You and I
have made journeys so mysterious
we can’t even remember


that we swam
as embryos in two amniotic seas
each bearing slits which grow into gills
in our fish-cousins.


But even stranger, we are the sea:
You and I are tributary and pool
of the water-womb
out of which the earth emerged:


that sea flows still
round and around your body.
Come closer:
Let me feel your hand:
I trace five hidden creeks.


It is all so vast: it escapes into infinity
and yet is brought so close.


My dizzied mind
conjures up landscapes richly layered
in rock-aeons, which are now re-membered
in the strata of my body;


conjures up moon-craters, star-deserts
long-exploded into cold space
into whirling dust
which reconfigures in your bodyscape
its dips and mounds, in the long plain of your back
miraculously fleshed.


Who would have thought that nitrogen
could discover laughter?
Or that the calcium of a long-dead star
would evolve into these words?


We have time, my love.
We are less than tiny, yet we have space


to glory in plant-cousins, animal-kin:
to touch scale and feather, fur and mane
in a tousle of warm hair.


How could we have thought
that anyone looked ordinary?