Love rode 1500 miles on a grey
hound bus & climbed in my window
one night to surprise
both of us.
the pleasure of that sleepy
shock has lasted a decade
now or more because she is
always still doing it and I am
always still pleased. I do indeed like
aggressive women
who come half a continent
just for me; I am not saying that patience
is virtuous, Love
like anybody else, comes to those who
wait actively
and leave their windows open.

Judy Grahn - Love Rode 1500 Miles

"Lightning Strike in Paradise"
By Andrew Hudgins

Jesus-the-wind combs Jesus-the-rye and shakes
the limbs of Jesus-the-scrub-pine-and-alder,
while a tractor, disking the rye, churns into the sunset
red clouds of Jesus. Jesus-the-bank-of-young-ferns
fringes Jesus-the-sluggish-and-rocky-stream
rich with tadpoles, crayfish and almost invisible minnows,
all Jesus Himself. Jesus-the-green-worm inches up air.
He humps His body, pulls His end to His middle, and pushes
upward to where he started, climbing His own fine thread
until a gust of Jesus snaps the silk and sends Him flying.
Jesus-the-lightning explodes an oak. Jesus-the-thunder reverberates
through green leaves, the Jesus leaves, silencing
the Jesus-chitter of squirrels, wrens and cicadas,
and in the distance the tractor never stops grinding
rye into the earth, preparing it for seed,
as the gunpowder smell of nitrogen settles over heaven.

Love: Beginnings

They're at that stage where so much desire streams between them,
so much frank need and want,
so much absorption in the other and the self
and the self-admiring entity and unity they make --
her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back
so far in her laughter at his laughter
he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual
in the headiness of being craved so,
she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again,
touch again, cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away
soaring back in flame into the sexual --
that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin,
that filling of the heart,
the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart,
snorting again, stamping in its stall.

-- C.K. Williams