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Beyond Love

by Tessa Grey

Flesh crept into this Stolid night
I am a vacancy waiting
for fingers and eyes
I want to be ravished
until my body is smoke; sharp with honey
I want a miracle
rubbed into the creases of my hands
to feel impossibility
the extraordinary weight of certainty

Everything is stark
you are a mass of spasms and teeth
wanting,
and what is beyond this?
would you, lion,
heartless ocean,
break me if I wasn't so wild?
I sit behind nameless clouds
waiting for a softer face
with hands less kind than my own
to prove me right.

I want you moving
with a mouth larger than my own
tenderness that makes me turn
like eyes from light.

Know, that I will always rise before you
for all my faults my heart is a harsh
and stupid wind,
great in its few certainties.

I have accepted with reverence
quietly, the secret dark
plum of the soil.
Past and future, spoken
the way color enters the sky
every silent blood hovering
in the distance,
a God looking on.

Need, with its dry lips
fills me with bones
that are only the ghosts of desire,
small slivers of untouched light

If these tender fragments
of trembling glory,
full and feverish,
can really mean anything
in the space that language allows,
more than a wound
I am under God.

10/17/2010

Author's Note: Going to be doing some major revisions of this poem, but for now it's pretty raw.

Posted on 10/17/2010
Copyright © 2024 Tessa Grey

Member Comments on this Poem
Posted by V. Blake on 10/17/10 at 06:59 PM

Well, I hope you don't change it too extensively, because it's pretty awesome as is.

Posted by Linda Fuller on 10/17/10 at 07:01 PM

Raw is good - there's some marvelous stuff here -"body is smoke; sharp with honey" "mass of spasms and teeth" "the secret dark plum of the soil" to name a few. A line that did strike a wrong note with me was "a harsh and stupid wind" - 'stupid' jarred me. I wish I could write like this.

Posted by Ken Harnisch on 10/18/10 at 12:35 PM

I hope the tweaks are minor, because this is a major raw accomplishment whose breadth of feeling comes roaring through just about every line

Posted by Jo Halliday on 10/19/10 at 12:23 AM

There certainly is a rawness to this poem, to your voice - your voice is young, very young, trusting the world and peeking into it and waking up with it and seeking adventures of your own in it. With a few minor changes, but not too many, this is a great poem.

Posted by Elizabeth Jill on 05/03/11 at 12:59 AM

perfect

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