Longing

What is this longing I could not mute, not even with wine and revelry? This morning it transformed into an erotic plea, like a melancholy drunk seeking solace in the arms of a prostitute. I want to dive into your flesh and know that you are equally grief-stricken and thereby capable of true understanding. And yet is this not about something deeper than the body keening for its fleeting ecstasies? Is this desire not about the always reaching, the always pleading eternal now, the coupling of gold and silver, the joining of sun and moon?

***

Bonsai

One morning beginning to notice
which thoughts pull the spirit out of the body, which return it.
How quietly the abandoned body keens,
like a bonsai maple surrounded by her dropped leaves.
Rain or objects call the forgotten back:
the droplets' placid girth and weight; the dresser's lack of ambition.
How strange it is that longing, too, becomes a small green bud,
thickening the vacant branch-length in early March.

~Jane Hirshfield