2223. Poetry: In This Way

By Jaime K. Reaser, Sacred Reciprocity: Courting the Beloved in Everyday Life, 2012

In This Way

The pudgy voles must be

nestled deeper now,
the meadow grasses damp
with the weeping of
half-hearted snow flurries,
and the fox and owl

tucked in by morning light,
stomachs robust and satiated
or burning with a hunger
strong enough to feed fear
into the hours ahead.

This is how I awaken.

Life on earth is a written language
that is read through the
living of it.

What is most tempting of
this day is everything that
I don’t know about its
unfolding

My Beloved is like this,
fully present yet always
out of reach of anything
intent on the possession
of answers that would shorten
the moment’s extended hand.

To be betrothed to
the Great Mystery
is to say “yes” to everything
that cannot be planned:

The next breath,

The next lover,

Death,

And how each will
take you in their arms,

with, or without,
mercy.

The vole knows only the
last pinch of the talon,
and the tongue-pressing
swallow of the fox,

but even in this,
there is time enough to
breathe out these words,

“So that was my life.

I am so very grateful.”

And in passing this way,
so many times,
you place your own
punctuation marks
in the Great Story,

Stops,
starts,
and the kind of exclamations

that can only come
from embodied feeling.

In this way,

You live and die,

in the way all
exhausted
lovers do.

© 2012-2016/Jamie K. Reaser
Published in "Sacred Reciprocity: Courting the Beloved in Everyday Life"