Madhuri

We are trees together sleeping,
exhaling shadows
felled into cupped silence;

our fluting
has impassioned cows by moonlight.
Banana slugs have lusted for our fingers,
we have dug green stone
from an ocean cliff.

It shattered into white foam,
and there were toads
in the muffled weeks of fog.

Darkness sifts beneath our eyelids
and we are again without a home
though there is rain on the roof
like occasional waking.

Madhuri Kathleen Akin
Riverside, Ca. 1968