Conversion

The Sahara waved her dunes around you like a skirt
and sucked you in
freed your mind from solid form
made you relinquish a world you could hardly recall
to put on her arid, barren renunciant's robes –
a twenty-year-old ascetic with sand in your locks
guided by a vision of a bearded, beaded man
from yet another continent that wasn't yours. 

You hadn't yet seen my name written in the sand –

Instead you offered vows of celibacy to a mirage
that you'd never quite reach
created rules for yourself – decided to obey
what the Earth herself has no say in.

And in your vast desert bedroom your vows belied
those curving dunes of the loose ground below
that you pressed yourself into at night.

Much later you came to lay your head in my lap –
to tell me of those sterile vows that forbade my touch,
speaking with saintly longing of banished desire
(that snake left in the desert
pushing sensual loops in the sand
past the brave, occasional root penetrating down.)

And I, why I would have loved to be your Sahara
but I was far too moist,
with thoughts forever reaching down
to that waterline.

You must have known that –
you must have sensed that you'd come to the edge
of your Sahara when you asked if you could draw me
in the nude – your red chalk etching the dunes of my body
with a river running through it.

You must have known
when you handed me scissors
and I cut each lock of your hair – released the desert grain by grain,
through my fingertips.
You must have said farewell to your sacred Sahara
when I touched your athletic, aesthetic, oh so ascetic body
that time
and licked the salt of that luscious cosmic ocean from your lips.