I have fallen for two women…

One, my mistress

And one my wife. 

My wife, The Rocky Mountains.

Her peaks erupt into the infinite canvas of her sky.

Periwinkle is picked from the cracks of them

like delicate, feminine veins 

They knit through her uncompromising nature.

I could watch her vacillating moods for hours 

being painted so quickly across that sky.  

I am brought to my knees by her vastness

and by her silence.

To hear her soul, you have to listen…

Listen to the way the alpine wind drafts through the keys of the needles of her pines.

Her granite thighs warn you 

that no part of her is gentle.

She is feral and aloof.

She waits for you to come to her.  

In the wintertime, she dresses in pure white.  

For a season, her desolate heart is shrouded 

in a sea of shifting, snow covered crests. 

To keep any part of her, you must give yourself up.  

You must become one of her alpine creatures. 

You must sip from the curves of her glacier clear streams. 

Hers is a ruthless beauty.

Hers is a temple to the empyrean.

And I pledged myself to her long ago.

My mistress, the Central American Jungle.

The fevered flesh she first gives you,

is mollified only by the torrent of her rain.

Her umbilical vines reach and coil inside you.

She is determined to claim you…

To keep you there with her always.

She is a seductress

Her fruits so succulent,

her green so green,

her fertility so humid, it stings your eyes.

She is too much of everything.

She screams at you to hear her

with a cacophony of insect and birdsong.  

Her aliveness is a welcome but claustrophobic embrace.  

She flirts with you

through the wingbeats of her blue morpho butterflies. 

But when you follow them, they lead you deep into your own shadow…

Deep into the soiled root system of her ancient shamanic heart.  

She is shadow and she is light.

Hers is a jealous blooming.

Hers is a chapel of pleasure and danger mixed equally. 

And I cannot stop coming back to her.

Though their beauty is wicked in such divergent ways,

you cannot call them wicked.

It is I that travels back and forth between them. 

It is I that cannot give them up. 

It is I that died for their beauty.

Being unable to own either of them, I gave a part of myself to them both.  

But once you see their beauty with your own two eyes,

you will not call me foolish to do so… Or even unwise.