SEAN DONAHUE

Highway Poem

Late September night,
southern wind disperses
smoke of incense
which re-forms in your image,

flood of memory:
saturday afternoon
southbound on I-95
toward New York,

Nude Seated on Left Leg

by Pablo Picasso

one hand on the steering wheel,
one hand on your breast,

you stretch out across the passenger’s seat,
head against the armrest,
leaning into my caress,
hand slides between your legs,

and you come like a hurricane
blowing in from the Gulf,
hot wind of breath,
pounding waves convulsing your body,

but at the center
deep calm
like sinking through
dark water
on a moonless night,

and my spirit follows you down
into that well of stillness,
swimming backward
against rivers of time,

reversing the migration
of the river dolphins
that swam from the Pleiades
carrying the first seeds of life,

and my song calls to you
through inner space
like a humpback whale
singing to his mate
across vast oceans,

calling to you so we can harmonize,
singing the world back into existence,

voices combine,
strands of sound
weaving a double helix

resonating at the points
where the two strands touch
subtle overtones combine in

original sound,
seed syllable
that vibrates the universe

in the rhythm of the pulsations
of your body
beneath my hand.

Botany of Desire

Nude Seated on Two Legs

by Pablo Picasso

how the ripe flesh of the fruit
seduces the carriers of seed,

how the hair of your crotch curls like ferns
but is soft and wet like moss
growing on the rocks at the edge
of a sweet and musky spring,

let me drink deep and know
the source of my trembling passion,

let me bury my root deep
in the warm, wet soil
where the flower petals fall
in the rainstorm.

Abstraction - Blue by Georgia O'Keefe

Magdalene

All night the soldiers
pass outside your window
while we lie together
on your dirt floor.

Burying my head
between your legs,
I tunnel inside you,
trying to drown myself
in your musky ocean

but I am driven back
by the feeling of
nails in my hands
and a voice that thunders
Now is not the hour!
Why do you call me Rabbi,
when you taught me
all I know
of being human?

My tears run down
your thighs
and mingle
with the tears
from your womb
(first appeared in Wired Arts For Wired Hearts)
 

Tulips bloom
on your front porch
in New Orleans,

refusing to believe
anything is ever lost,

their purple centers
hinting at the color
of the sky in the moment
before the first star
flashed into existence.

In the same world,
bomb fragments
render flesh
as fragile as flower petals,

embedding themselves
in the stomach of an
eleven year old girl
in Baghdad,

who keeps throwing up
her medicine
too wild with pain
to know that she is dying.

My heart is not big enough
to contain these images,
so I turn it inside out
trying to make it stretch
to hold the universe,

then stumble toward you
drunk with metaphysical vertigo

and pull your body against mine,
trying to make the smooth skin
of your inner thighs
the boundary of my world,

trying to get you to take me
deep enough inside you
to touch the white hot
core of your being

and feel it explode,
washing over me in a boiling deluge,
sending the flesh of the universe quivering,

giving birth again to a world
perfect in the unity
of its infinite flowering.