Yielding to Calliope
Kalon
Tonight with the fullmoon outside and the snow layering my redvan's
windshield
We sat on the couch and ate chocolate chip oatmeal cookies
And you weren't ten years younger than me and you weren't
A feminist-pagan-liberated-freelove-Wicca-babe and I wasn't
A Christian-fundamental-rightwing-homemaking-evangelist
And you fed the fish and I told you secrets about me and you said
You weren't really lonely and I believed you and I took off my hiking
boots and
Stuck my feet under me on your couch and we stayed talking that way
until
One in the morning. And you loaned me spellbooks full of Welsh names
And I talked about my Jesus and you talked about touching the Divine
every day
And I said it didn't matter if Jesus was true, only that I want him to
be
And you said that didn't make sense but you didn't crush me with your
words
And I knew we floated on a truth underneath the truth we were trying to
say
There on your sofa and I knew that if God came into the world, he-she
came into that Room with the fish and the cookies and two of us, more
and more like sisters, sitting in Our socks and you fragile and luminous
and wise and me expanding with a lightness as Our words twined round in
spirals and up across the ceiling like incense.
From Yielding to Calliope, Brass Weight Press, 2002.
