Falling in Love

Sometimes you fall through a deepening crack,
Mt. Etna burns in your throat, and you spit out broken shards
of clay, coiled like a snake around your own ashes.
Maybe a hole in the sky
opens to strike you down on the way to Damascus
or maybe you walk through a wall on the way
to somewhere else cloaked in invisibility and feathers
of the Great Horned Owl. You've never been here before
and you're a little queasy at first, a little tipsy from
too much sugar in your bloodstream. But then it's
taken a lifetime to bend like a reed, hasn't it? To be hollow
and filled with nothing
and let the wind play you, your breath on fire, your
hands asleep with a poet's pen, your mind betrayed by all that silence.

It is here you awaken for the first time, for the last time.
Poems from the inside out haunt you for the rest of your life
and all that is evergreen stays with you, challenging you,
challenging you. But you've forgotten who you are--
a god with clay feet, trying to remember the music.