untitled conversation

[RiverNotch]

Things are coming back to me
as if I had forgot,
as if I'd not been occupied
my entire life with remembering
eyes all dark and empty,
cold and glassy, until I contemplate them,
I compare them, and they become
as deep and vast and mirrorlike and green
as -- what else? -- the sea.

                                       As if they're ancient history.
                                       Sometimes I wish we were the players
                                       of an Attic tragedy,
                                       masks dividing lips that try to touch
                                       and gruesome ends delivered out of view:
                                       everything we do, we do with dignity.

I really want to touch you.
I really want to feel
your skin against my skin,
our fingers interlaced,
my lips against your lips
(briefly, as a greeting) --

                                       But I always return to the god of my ancestors,
                                       the god I cannot name, who with his contradictions,
                                       with his indignities and idiosyncracies,
                                       contains more than a pantheon. Do you know why he parted
                                       the Red Sea but merely lowered
                                       the River Jordan?

Some believe it's because he hates
what waters cannot be drunk,
whatever will not sate --

                                       It's because there was no heathen
                                       Pharaoh to humiliate
                                       when his people finally came back
                                       to the land he'd promised them.