Espousal

Roy Dean Doughty
Written 3/17/06, Anada Loka 3, India

The sky, with its customary virtuosity,
Began encoding messages into us
In preparation for apotheosis. All day, the heat
Kept rising in the white-blue inundation of a space
In which the total river of human emotions flowed
In the eddying seraphic movements of unseen multitudes,
No longer arrested in their usual tragic-comic poses,
But free now, and blessed, intensifying the atmosphere,
Until gradually, as if quietly, profoundly weeping,
Whether from grief or joy, they fell as perfumed rain.
The red soil and the marbled mountains
And the several luminosities of emerald
Hidden until that moment in the foliage
Rose to embrace the river, and the sky
Began to slowly swirl in sumptuous diaphanes
Of pastel peaches and shimmering irises,
Blushing with the ripeness of a heavenly fruit,
Which, until that instant, had never before
Quieted the hungers of human eyes.
Now Time, which had been segmented, severed, pained,
Began to pool, and the lovers, that astonishing, simple pair,
Poised as the perfect two, began their sojourn into ecstasy.
The pool widened and deepened as the night came on,
And the river, with its turbulent griefs and rages,
Its childish exultations, its incessant wars,
Became the sea, and the lovers, no longer a you, a me,
But an integrous deity composed of all those bodies,
Their hopes, their wounds, became a We.
We were inside the ocean,
Beautifully bringing everything life and peace.
The night sounds thrummed a euphonious medley of silence,
And then the beginning of holiness, the apotheosis, ensued.
She rose, the moon, in a huge round haze of golden splendor,
As soft as the rustling silks of all those angels,
And Time, as we gaze on her feminine orbit of light,
Bequeathed to us, two simple human beings,
Seated alone in the hush of the mango grove,
Her universal passion. We held our breath. We breathed.
She reached down, then, the moon, and touched our hearts,
And we, we two, ourselves and everyone,
Leaned close, and gently, oh so gently, kissed.

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