Your love as fierce
as the craving of angels, their frozen cries
scored in stars across the night; your love a calling
clear as the ecstasy of the skeptic
in old age, your love a trial
and testament, your love a crux
a crucible, a tundra of thirty years' deep slumber
slapped into life by the lap and gush
of breaking waters, the barrens grassed with sage.
"I must have you at the source," you said, and
"I must have you at the source" and
at the watershed and the snowline under pines and drumlins,
attics in the limestone city and the bars
of West Coast winter nights, will you

fuck me with your body of fire, until the still
sea inside me thaws or fractures
and the brine of my body foams through you
into further seas, into estuaries
upriver still leaping with the Chinook-
salmon for the freshes and the green source, for the salt
walls of the canyons and the water-
fall veiling the rock
face of God. A rill in high ranges wakes with sun
from its frozen sleep, and in the still
midnight cirque, flesh quickens around our cries
to a mote floating inside you like the moon

on the calm waters of the mountain pool.

- Steven Heighton