I imagine you near me.

Tuffs of white hair frame the welcome of your eyes, a soft inner peace replaces the dusting of chaos from the outside world. We move to the bed, pull back the wedding quilt and leave our clothes on the floor. You are mine now, freely given, holding nothing back. No thought is elsewhere secretly wishing for something other. What power rests in being completely present in one another.

What blissful abandon is made possible by merging desire into the fullness of each moment. I have come home to you, and you to me. Our bodies have ached for each other through lifetimes of separation. This union is far greater than husband and wife, or relationship in any context I have known.

Our union is the union of the moon pulling the tide from the sea. It is the core of life that pulses through the sap in every tree; it is the sun tenderly opening the face of each new flower. We journey in this place of perfect oneness, you and I, and all that we make together. We journey for hours and days until the task becomes one of pulling apart. We invent things to do that are other then this homecoming.

I cook to further delight your senses. Each ingredient intoxicated with my rapture in your arms, each mouthful you praise holds my desire. You have come home to me at last. May this offering melt in your mouth and move to every cell in your hungry body, as I long to fill every corner, and to be filled.

Explore it all, the sweet, the sour, the hot, the cold. Vegetables simmering in melted butter, cheese yielding and blending over eggs. Herbs freshly clipped from the garden. We’re bringing the outside in, one ingredient at a time.

You go back for seconds and thirds licking the plate clean. What was that? you ask. I’ve never tasted anything like it. I have no language for that experience.

How can I tell you? Your appetite is primordial, my ability to satisfy encoded.

And what do I answer when friends call and ask, What have you been doing?

We nest now in the bodies of one another. We’ve made a home in another reality. This new space holds us as lovers, both stepping in on the same June day. The ceilings reach for the sky in sloping angles refusing to be boxed ~ a rice paper screen and antique shawl shelter our safety.

I have no one to cook for now. My appetite has diminished. Yet, I ache for you and those journeys in our nest of a bed. For the first time in our lives we know what love is. Dare I speak for you? I think so. We know how it feels, how it smells and how it tastes. We know what the face of love looks like, and we are profoundly humbled by it’s bold uncensored truth.

written July 2005