The Vibrant Channeled Creator

by-sulkhan-gogolashvilli

This poem is by Lee Upton, from her book Undid in the Land of Undone.

Omniscient Love

He was in knocking range of my secrets.
He had found kelp there,
he nested in the coral beds.
In a past life he was born
to me as a set of twins.
He was applied to me as a topical ointment.
He was a prescient code,
a secret writing shaped into flesh.
He was the fathomer I never expected,
the pillow talk of the bureaucracy,
the breeze that could carry the world off-course.
It was as if we’d always believed in each other precisely,
and even the clouds agreed,
and the dog and his bone;
every particle of language
jumped like a flea around him. He was
a pirate’s nautical exercise
and an argument for the resurrection.
He was in every seed bed
and digression.
He was bending down my angels and breasting
the seas of goldenmost wheat.
To ask for everything and get it
seemed a paltry thing
next to being recognized by him.
A button couldn’t pop
but he was there with a net.

I admire the playfulness and the strangeness of this extravagant love poem. Loaded with metaphors and hyperboles, it epitomizes the language of love. Upton uses kaleidoscopic metaphors, i.e., wide-ranging and exhaustive. Her hyperboles strain the bounds of what is possible, e.g., “every particle of language / jumped like a flea around him.” How else to describe the perfection of this beyond perfection beloved!
written by Diane Lockwood