For Linda, on her 27th Birthday

I

She uncoils wind in its slender
sinews
both surface and depth
and my uncurling bones,
it names this mystery,
its softening, like a sad evening
shunted between doors.

She unrolls in my rippling muscle
such tenseness unknotting time,
a loud noise in a shock of being.
My prick erects in this toppling universe,
and all our hearts
like coins
in a box

like a mirror in all necessity,
my miraculous us! 

i strip the shadow from this
piece of wood
my legs unfreeing its animal
in all these places,
the surly sun splinting
its four fingers in lips
and folds

most like all
her curving slender,
her emptying, all
my mountaineous me.

She has broken the bread of my
tongue’s whistling
to open in skeletons the shadow
of this surprise.
This man knitted in rock
unknuckles his longing, O

your path is welcome,
and moist,
with her emptiness.

II

In this loud field two horses
share her trembling.
In this loud field
my chest expanding between
two tropics,
two horses unfolding
like a heart bellowing
in all its valleys,
like nature, in my steel cage,
unfurling her cruelty in seasons and lust.

She makes our walking
in its water running
uncoupling in arms this fury of
the skin, both loves
are loud in my lovely extension,
both stabbing in its curses,
here’s a loss at daybreak saluting the silence.

And so comes all helloes in the
completion of parting,
my minutes-in-merging
for a child swimming in membranes,
this world with one wing whispers
in wetness and lungs

such dancing in air!
and a screaming rain
falling with angels,
and both pleasure and pain,
and sheathlike, like a foetus
unflooding in our futures.

III

We ripple in this wave
like a sun journeying
in contradiction.
It is this place, this lovely place,
both here and gone.
It is this meeting full of departures
all struggling to our fullness,
it is this loudness in the curving of
our stillness
and echoes echoing
each otherness,

love,

and all our greeting,
this heart in its splendour.

IV

But we are dumber than beasts
here, full of grieving,
and keen to the knifeedge.

And then the nameless burning of
this burning man
born
aside of woman.

My man me then
in its birth of passion,
i’m empty too,
in its mouthfulls of death,

despite all,
them miracles! uncoiling,
survive all.

– Séamas Carraher