thought for Thursday - Poem by Jonathan Bohrn

Tomorrow's Thursday again,
swept with the days' meandering flow:
this, that, and the week goes,
hearing time splash through cracks.
whose arrangement now seems
spaced in distance of memories,
recollections, recurring regrets,
the trickle of moments at hand.

Once I encountered a woman,
a stranger, traveling like I did:
we shared our origins,
our parched tongues
speaking a language the land understands -
we overwhelmed it with wordlessness
our thoughts of encounter,
exploration, exploitation
that filled our horizons fleetingly
like hunger-filled stormclouds
devoured like cotton-candy in fleshtones,
greedy fingernails filling with skin
lapping the taste of our red sea
grinding our teeth in ecstasy
as we sought mutual possession,
our sweat in mingling small streams
seeking to bury itself and us
in the soil underneath.
Featherlight,
we could steal boulders in pretense,
afford to lose lifetimes;
Admiring our faces,
we laughed in the embrace
of bareness.

"Life isn't planned", my love says,
face furled in a way I've always remembered,
never really aware of the little lines
that deepen our faces,
human landscapes coursed by rivers
that deepen and carve year by year.
Traveling together,
we rarely notice the changes,
our expectations settling like starlings
turning the thought that
reconciling intimacy and freedom
we've circled another year
to the point of beginning,
somehow reborn in the process.
Tomorrow's Thursday again.

(2000)