51 Imagination poems

I approached the luminous stranger who came to me from darkness in a gown of lettuce leaves, in a velvet cloak of green that appeared at first another piece of dark, but pulled apart into the glow-sphere that danced in swaying steps, the lucent majesty that slipped toward me from the reigning silence black above my cage. Oh extravagant—and were my teeth too sharp to greet or sharp enough? I do not understand now what was meant to happen and what was a mistake—but know the bursting, the sickening snap of ecstasy wrenched back to the body and the green gown flung in crippled circles traced like diagrams of wasting moons above my head—or portals to another world, I thought, but as I thought, the shriek dissolved, the body crumpled from the air and landed on its side beneath the salt lick. All night I tended the wasted skin and careful, brought it water, alfalfa, made a bed of cedar chips and tried to gather molecules of breath that floated from the plant shelf. When I remembered morning, I began to cry, began to pray for night to stay until the green took shape again and if that shape were gone, I prayed for night to stay, to be held in the same forever-dark in which I first looked up and saw the gentle body, and saw the graceful swaying of the stranger coming as if for me—now I do not know—but then, as if for me, and all my loneliness gone.