Scorpio Rising

Poem

Photo by author.

My chin wakes over the sky of your shoulder,

already you cry as the mountains shed their white.

And we have the usual problems. Making love we are lost

in separate dreams while the ocean unravels wave over

wave. You are a teenager isolated behind his bedroom

door; I am the seafoam boiling over us.

You wade into the surf, wade until the tide stops moving.

I lay out blankets and dig my joints into the sand, watch your body

ride the swells. We live at times roughly, like debris spinning

inside a quiet galaxy. Asleep we glitter like cities in the desert.

You are not unlike the birds skittering over the hard sand.

I want to be the old couple sitting in the water, holding hands.

Wild children gather around us. I make faces at them but you don’t play.

One day you will walk toward me with your wandering particles,

dripping with peace. We will live out happiness and owe it to

a quest for something —

Each winter you make yourself so small

only I can find the shade in your valley. Look into

my hands, love, listen. I am the voice of forgotten orphans,

I pray with a wandering crowd who insists on burying their hearts

in this unearthly ground. Look, look. How can you feel

abandoned, lying here with a Scorpio protector,

with so many grains of sand holding you up?