To Two in Paradise

And all my nightly dreams
 Are where thy grey eye glances

 And where thy footstep gleams-
 In what ethereal dances,
 By what eternal streams.

                   —Edgar Alan Poe

I couldn’t hear Jesus singing through the trees,

but kept too many lines of Poe’s, his testament

flooding my soul—a thousand blackbirds in a storm.

They swayed their graveyard hips to every mention

of heaven.  We gave our praise like gospel singers.

We sang secret messages to the earth and the bones.

Would you laugh or cry with only one moment

in Paradise?  We drive away fast from the tall gray

outlined shrine of hemlocks growing by the road.

Black feathers laid out of devotion on the altar

of gravestone.  Waiting for one last gust of wind

to drop them down to the hungry dark soil.

You and I are in love and arrange our wings. 

Friends each day, returning to the soil black night,

reborn again at morning in love—this is our scripture.

Past the garlic fields and their tales of sulfur we drive,

each moment together is our reformation movement.

We laugh to cry as we play our harps and sing.

J. P. Dancing Bear