Some say Jesus laid with Lazarus
the way turtle doves press together;
I am not one to doubt, love.
As I lay with women, a woman
in my own right, I am confronted
with a graphic depiction of a man and a woman in sex,
conceiving Kahlil Gibran, Galileo Galilee,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Marie Curie,
Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, like points of light.
Head raised, sternum held, I try to walk
with the lanterns they make tossing shadows all about me.
Some say I will die
with boiling lead down my throat,
Saint Boniface echoing violent deaths to those
who imagine things not as they are.
Yet here I lay with her golden hair spread
like a climbing rose
across my weighted shoulders, her touch
expelling the world for awhile,
a summer sun in cold winter, granting a vision
of Jesus with Lazarus.
