EMOTIONAL

by: Michael Strange

      EAN your mouth well over into the moonlight
      So that I may kiss it full, O chance--
      Press me into your pungent arms
      So jagged with nightmare--so rent with spasmodic glories--
      So pliant with momentary relaxing--
      O your arms so compact with variety--
      For no strident with triton freshness
      And glossed as if by spray shaken off a burst of godliness
      Out of glacier streams--
      And now slippery-darkened with that moulten calm
      Preceding some sinister extase--
       
      O chance--stinging--refreshing
      Like a sudden rain of flowers across my being that is ever held
      So deliberately accessible--
      O chance teasing with evasive glimpses of some further road
      Ever lightening towards breathless eventualities--
      Aye, for ever alternately veiling--disclosing--
      That face approximate of Heaven--and hell.
       
      I am resting by the edge of the sea--
      But in my arm is a curve imperceptible
      For the weight of your head--lover--comrade--
      My feet are damp with the vigorous jet of the sea--
      My body is splashed in a sudden pour of sunlight
      Spreading down now in widening--blazing torrents--
      From behind the pushed-away clouds--
      Yet I long to be chilled--warmed--and surpassing these--
      And by our limbs co-mingling--lover--comrade.
       
      Sad, we must find each other--ourselves--life--out
      Through this impediment of love--
      (With its billion toe-stubbings along the Olympian track.)
      Pathetic we must exercise by falling out of the sky
      And chasing our own tails for awhile--
      Instead of feeling our manes tearing out behind us
      Along those freezing spiral vapours of the Continuous Ascension.
       
      O You and I have stood poignantly close upon the edge of perilous slanting--
      And with sublime sunbeams bouncing from upturned face to face
      And measuring upon each utter equality of dazzle--
      O you and I have leant fraternally together in a light
      Reducing to proportionate form at last--
      All those melancholy grotesques of conscious life--
      Yea and together heard a conclusive goodness affirming
      Through vast harp-sweet spaces--
      Then--then--the reverential swoon of our knees
      Before this momentary shining out of the beyond
      Has been cause for a touch between us--
      Ah, what union in this accidental knocking of knees
      Before a Shared Presence--
      When suddenly--suddenly--
      The thrown-back hood of vision clamping down precipitant,
      And a sadness in the air as of some Divine Retreat--
      When my claw stirring--waking--reaching out--
      And in your answering motion a gracious shoot of reverberating "yea"--
      Then your eyes becoming a liquid gale
      Importunate--parting--pressing aside my branches--
      And your mouth a distortion of fire skipping--falling--
      Clinging strangely among my blossoms--
      My blossoms opening--shedding for you in ghastly broad abandon--
      O love--love--unequipped--unaware
      Of the subtle fatality in your own repletion.

"Emotional" is reprinted from Resurrecting Life. Michael Strange. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921.

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