Sunday poetry

Loving a Woman

I was nineteen and on LSD
the only time God spoke to me.
Or, if not God, a voice so clear
and clearly not my own
it could have been the creek,
still so clean we could kneel
and drink. The day was warm,
a thrum of insects, budding of cells,
the fat leaves opening their pores,
the building up of sugars
and the breaking down,
the trees' green breath
spilled into my lungs.
I sat in the stream, a stone
the water washed over,
wearing away each rough surface.
On the other shore she
lounged against a boulder,
branches above her,
framed in a darkling shrine.
The voice could have been
the air itself, saying,
Nothing you could do
would ever be wrong.
The words entered me like the sun
pouring into the mouths
of the leaves as they stirred,
as the light shifted down
on her slight shoulders,
her freckled cheekbones.

~ Ellen Bass