Mouth
This is the heart's wish, the lone
friend of the heart,
who doesn't spread its secrets,
but the twin red beats are pushed
with dark blood. Who thought of the kiss,
this bend of flesh and the letter it writes
against the hair, or into night,
the evening's blue shoulder?
Tonight you watch as I become a myth:
diminishing the clothes against my skin,
their slow descent against the gypsy whim of body.
The reds of flesh and lip and tongue,
back of the throat, and parts of speech,
parts of the world we love in whispers
of this private, lurid, throaty prayer.
Within what wide brace of strength
comes all this scent and wonder,
all these fat demands it makes
against my body's little, starry form.
Inside I am all constellation,
a transparent toy or a lantern of curve
and blaze, a work of fiction. But isn't that
the trouble with desire? It rides into town
when it wishes, and kicks up the dirt,
makes the womenfolk scream. Darling,
the rain, the blue vivid night. My curve
of words, my spread of leg.
Get your saddle on.
Rain
Easy to take, this gray that travels
with a vague wet heart. It gestures
the room, bothers the pale cool
random of the sheets. Out the window
all the trees begin the blossom, sense the shape
an outstretched limb desires. Who will notice
this ritual of practical want, this terrestrial
symmetry? We move as deliberate
as the earth's acquiescence, its sleepy whir,
both slow and hard turning
into this sweet approaching storm.
All the prolonged sense until the wet.
Finding the colors of grass and hay
under skin. The cool cliché
of all this water, its attendant beauty,
while the world decides itself in shapes,
the inside spun of something dark
and sullen. In rain, the way the torso
knows to turn into the curves of wish
and all the gestures of circumnavigation
will make the room atop the earth adhere
like a tiny centrifuge. Outside,
the crickets sing their bodies, amazed
at their legs as tongues: such idea, such dreaming.
Synapse
I dream of this: a screen door, and
outside it, some hard thought, the threat
of what I want: male width and span
and neck and hands. Will you
describe the column of the world into a story,
and give me all that story, handsome flesh,
one muscled chapter at a time?
My every leaf of body spread
as if the world a table and you
prepared to eat: Who comes
to me in this four a.m. shade of beast?
I am undone for sleep, all hips and hollows,
hungers, my little pinks, swift flesh, and
while I imagine the screen swung wide
to this heart's ambition, while I imagine
his welcoming hurt and all bets off
how to accomplish the body's hard want?
The long hooks of the flesh, its blossoms,
its bad girl voice, all loyal to this vagrant stranger,
and mom said not to speak to him, but oh
Hooksexup
There, you have found it,
the heart's vague push set to music
thin as a christening bell, wide
as a body of water, Dear Flesh, I just wrote
to say will you touch me in that same
decisive way, the knowledge
rude and yet. It is the longest window
filled with clear glass, and as it pulls
a thin blank shade,
it gleams and this long leg lifts,
my darling, see the stretch as muscle
begs for your Dear Flesh,
I want all body, all, and all
the scent she said, and all the trees at once
let down their leaves and skin dissolved
like it was weather, lessening, and it was
cool and fall inside the room.
In this ritual of the world's limbs,
inelegant and rough but overwhelmed,
it was mere touch as sweet as deep green grass
at night, the eight o'clock of it,
the thin dream full of leg,
descending whim of the natural world
as a blanket on the bed
oh love,
in how my waist gives up to you,
this vast wandering, its cool and swift extravagance,
touch me again.
Tree
limbs have fallen from some uncertain dream,
these small, useless gestures
of little, childish green. These early,
thoughtless leavings of the hard night's rain, and
what was it you said before I disappeared beneath the
ivory of the sheets? Dear love, touch me again.
Someone's mouth, a hurt promise
of all that can be soft, or its mate, the distinct hurt
of sex. Soft as this image: curled small tea
unfurling in water; hard as this:
architecture of your flesh. Between the rushing weight
of rain and the world's restless spin,
the outside littered with tendril and seed.
Across the acre of blue, green,
a morning's glimpse, this view of the sky
whose pulse of leaves resists
what I imagined the possibility of a tree could be:
the body rudely drawn, thick root.
And I a vestibule, the simple love of viscera
and all that timeless skin.
This moment of waking,
the desperate, cool and waiting blood.
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