Sacrament

The Mexican rain rides bolts of blue lightning

dismounting on the hot, cracked ground that is so

like the sound of your voice. I am here,



in the land of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo

riding bolts of this love, so thick it can only

be rendered in paint or blood. She said



painters paint, weavers weave, and Frida

Diegos, making him into The Verb. For me,

you are The Verb, my reason to breathe. Today,



in the jardin, when the swelling sun and the scent

of gardenias left me dizzy, the only thing I could think

was, I wish I could give this moment to you, wrap it up



in corn husks like a tamale and deliver

it to you on a silver plate. Here,

churches swallow saint's bones.



They tuck skulls away in their dark mouths, in the walls,

in the floors. Mary Magdalene's pitted tibia soaks up

the colors of the stained glass glinting in the setting sun.



My bones are buried in the church of you.


I wrote this poem. I have been thinking about love, about what I want. What I want is a man who is bigger than me. I want a man who walks into a room and takes up all the air. I want a man who walks into a damp, dank cave and sets it on fire. I want a man with wings who laughs while he is cart wheeling through the clouds. I want a man with the courage to cry. I want a man who will teach me. I want a man who is so smart, I have to whip open a dictionary and an encyclopedia and maybe keep my laptop handy so I can Google the things he says. I want a man who understands art, not necessarily because he has studied it, but because he is it.

I want a man brimming with fire, a fire that burn into his eyes and fingers and lips and scorches my skin, my soul. I am tired of settling. I want a big love. They kind they write about in all the books that matter. The kind of love great men sing about on their deathbeds. I want a great man who will sing my name on his deathbed. I have decided this world has more to offer than what they say. They say things, write bulleted lists of rules. Find your man here. He will look like this. He will do these things, and you must put up with them. He will not see you. That is the way these men creatures are. He will not want to discourse on the possibilities of the human soul, the possibilities of the infinite universe. He will be too busy with his thirteen fantasy football teams and the Spice Channel for such nonsense.

Nonsense, I say. Nonsense. I refuse to believe that all men are Neanderthals. This one man taught me that. He walked like he was walking on water, always, even over concrete and brick, he water walked. He made miracle into a verb, just by being. He miracled. I want a man who miracles. At this point, anything less than that is nonsense. Nonsense I say to these boys who saunter up to me with their panties throbbing and say silly things, looking for an angle, as if I am a fish they can lure onto their lines. To touch me, you do not need bait. You need truth.

I want a man who carries truth in his eyes. I want to look there and see that, though he may be a complicated knot I will never untie, he is not lying. I want a man who is satin soft and diamond hard. Who knows when to bend and when to break and when to stand his ground. I want a man who can say: sometimes, I am weak. When he is broken, I want him to bury his broken body in mine, rest his face on my breasts, burn me with his tears. I want a man who knows how to laugh when things are funny. I want a man who is prone to falling in love, not just with me, but with everything. I want a man who can thrill at the sight of the sun falling into the sea, or smile because a grass blade is so very green.

I want a man who knows how to dream. I want a man who still believes in possibilities. I want a man who believes in the possibilities of this life, this planet, this universe. I want a man who believes in the possibilities of his own soul. I want a man who believes in the possibilities of mine.

I want a man who sees me and says, “Holy shit. That’s it.” I want him to know. I don’t want him to always be looking over his shoulder, wondering if there is something better, something younger, something thinner, something more boobalicious, out there. I want him to look into my eyes and see the sea that crashes behind them. I want him to strip naked and dive into my ocean and never come up for air again. I want him to drown in me. I want to drown in him. I want a man who has a propensity for drowning in passion. I want big love.

I wrote this once, in a book. These paragraphs came to me the day I found out the thing that made me leave my husband. It was a life changing time. Hours before my life changed forever, I was riding along, and these words came so strong, I pulled over at the first coffee shop I saw and let them pour out of my fingertips. They felt like they came from somewhere else. They were the last words of a book called "Where the Dead Men Lost Their Bones," which took me three years to write. They were, looking back, a perfect description of what I want from love:

This is how modern love stories end. Happily ever after with no bruises is a fairy tale. There is no happily ever after. But there is this. There is love. Love that stretches on and on into forever, beyond the boundaries of time and space and society and religion and rules. Love that winds itself around two people like a python, like a living noose, and squeezes them together until they cannot ever be whole alone again. Modern love stories end this way, with two broken people who can never be whole again.

But they are still our favorite stories, these love stories. Because we know that when the days and nights and dawns and dusks bleed together into black, when the noise of expressways and supermarkets and laugh tracks blur together until they become an endless deafening hum, there is a deep magic, a deep music, that keeps its color, that beats in time to the pounding of our most sacred and ancient hearts, that no self-help guru, no talk show host, no priest, will ever be able to define or explain. This magic, this music has a name. That name is love. And it breaks and batters and binds and bleeds and bridges and burns. It conquers all. And leaves the conquered broken. And human in their brokenness.

This is the gift love leaves in its wake. It leaves us shattered, to be molded into something better more beautiful longer and stronger. Love breaks us, and in the end, if we could look that far forward and backward into forever, makes us pieces of something vast and whole, makes us pieces of the rocky, watery planets spinning in their orbits, and the infant stars exploding into fiery life and melting back down into nothing, and the asteroid belts and the atoms and the first breaths and the big bangs and the Genesises and the Revelations. Love breaks us and makes us part of forever.

That is the gift love leaves when it is gone.