W
Listen
W
Listen
W
Listen
After Unexpected Snow
Your feet are round
and rough like mis-
shapen potatoes,
each with five perfect buds on the end.
Everyday you plant them over and over.
When you lay down and I kiss your left sole
and your right sole -- those hollows
that hold up the rest of you --
I smell the earth.
I love the long roads
of your legs
which lead to the dark field at your center.
When I enter there,
you laugh from your other mouth.
I love the tiny knot on your belly
through which your birth blood flowed --
it is the source of your laughter
and the final seal of your entrance into the world.
When your body ripened
it marked where your son
tumbled through waters within.
I love your breasts --
they are your body's answer to small mouths
and a gift for my hands.
My fingers call
and your nipples rise to meet them.
Your mouth is the gate that watches your words
and the winds that enter you.
I love your words most of all.
Messengers from your inward regions,
they fill me with longing for the parts of you
I cannot reach.
W
Listen
Sometimes I'm permitted to journey across your body,
and my hands like confused travelers
pause at your breasts,
and I would become lost
but for the scars.
Cesarean, appendix, those marks where your belly stretched
over your only child --
you offer these paths, and my fingers follow
certain they cannot lose their way.
Only one spot on your body is so private I dare not touch:
the tiny swelling where your chin
once splintered under
the boot of a former lover.
Bone slivers still in the flesh there
must find their own way out,
the jagged edges working.
Until they wound the skin,
like tiny fishhooks emerging,
they are the flesh's memory of a dark room
and the knuckle-pop sound of bone breaking.
When my body covers yours I change,
much as the clouds outside my window shape themselves
to the tan hills.
I rain down. Kisses grow from my lips.
I offer them the way a tree offers apples.
I enfold the whole of you --
your arms, your legs, the flat of your belly,
and the place on your chin where you prod
yourself from the inside.
Because I am a man and you a woman
my hand is a small animal that longs
to travel the road of your thigh
to that dark place
where it would urge you
to open and prepare.
My friend, a great distance lies between us --
miles of hillsides.
When I think of the lengthy highway,
I see at the end your arms
which descend to your long fingers,
your hips which like a set of scales
balance your belly, your shoulders,
your breasts,
which have the right weight
for a palm or a mouth.
Do not hate me for this --
I realize you are more than your body's shape.
The current of your voice crosses the distance between us.
My hand is to blame
and the warm blood coursing through it.
Please forgive me -- I cannot help my hand is weak.
I cannot help how it tugs constantly toward
your body's center.
How wonderful when my eyes are assaulted
by your bare body in the morning.
The sun slants onto you through the window,
and for an instant your reflected flesh
colors everything,
enlivening the white walls.
The muscles of your thighs and buttocks
release and tighten
as you walk from the room.
Then the room darkens
until you emerge, washed, dressed for the new day,
tying a sash around your waist
as you look in the mirror,
your hand flattening the pleats of your skirt.
How beautifully your neck rises
from your shoulders,
lifting your head,
that wonderful container that holds your name
and your memories.
Yes, when you stand close and my eyes linger
on the hollow of your throat,
halfway between your head and heart,
I become aware of your body --
the home of your hunger --
hidden beneath your clothes.
But not your body, your words --
which are your breath come to life --
draw me closer to you:
the way your lip grows tense and fierce as you talk
about what angers you,
and how you throw yourself down into such pure sadness.
These changes spread across your face
like ripples over the clean surface of a pond.
Sometimes you reach --
touch my arm or shoulder when I least expect it --
and I want to pull away from the suddenness
but your hand -- calm, reassuring -- remains
as if to say, This too I accept,
this uneasiness that keeps us apart.
When I feel broken
and ashamed of my brokenness --
my feet fouled by the sorrows I stumble into
when I'm least aware --
we sit down and eat,
you on your side and I on my side of the table.
Your words are a gift to me,
and when I talk you refuse to turn away.
As we get up to go I'm contained by a thin shell
of contentment,
and I see I am not really broken but all in one piece,
like the table the waitress now scrubs
with strong hands.
W
Listen
Your face comes to me sometimes --
a face I never held or kissed,
yet I carry it
like an old coin with the image worn
until the chin and eyes are gone.
Today, while turning through a stack of papers, I found your photo,
and a window opened,
and I saw not only you as you were --
your brown hair flipped back and folded over your shoulder --
I saw my own longing, that youthful ache
that knows it wants though it knows not what.
In my boy's body I watched your girl's body move:
It shone -- brightness like a flame
shifted through your bones
as if through the twigs of a burning bush.
And I burned
as though I'd taken a part of you,
a twig from the fire,
and gulped it down.
I never spoke of this;
my poor scorched mouth
could not round out the words.
Even now -- though I've watched myself soften into middle age --
I'm stunned, occasionally, by the spark of a young body,
and my mouth stammers --
the old burns rise freshly on my tongue --
as your youth flickers from that time to this.
My kisses are leaves ready to fall
to your shoulders, your arms, your neck,
but they do not fall because you
are reluctant.
I entreat, you turn aside --
is it because you find my hands ugly?
I will hide my hands.
Perhaps you have set those inward eyes,
the focus of your mind,
on some distant hill -- beautiful, unreachable --
and can no longer see
me sitting before you.
I would stand,
a bush beside your door unnoticed,
if I could.
My branches would whisper in the breeze
of your passing.
You tell me
a man was once inside you
uninvited.
When I think of how he touched those parts
you protect most,
I grow ashamed
because I watch your body sway and I want
to be near you.
When I think of how he entered you,
I grow ashamed because,
if we stand close, my face to your face,
my penis cannot help but aim secretly
below your belt.
When I think of the revulsion in the blue light of your face,
and how it spread across your body,
I grow ashamed of how my eyes search out
your bare patches,
this time an arm,
that time the strip open below your shirt,
piecing them in memory until you're unclothed
and complete.
But when I accept you
naked in my mind,
I see no shame,
only the lamp of your body and the light
from what was broken and in me
is wholly desirable again.
We forget how
it surges
inside us,
that bucketful of ancient sea.
But during moments of birth,
moments when our bodies break down,
it appears,
a bright flag set to remind us
we are fragile.
And how red it blooms from that opening
where women and men find union,
as if to celebrate the moon,
a great white mouth slowly widening and narrowing,
repeating, Yes ...
Yes ...
Sometimes my body disappears into yours, wet snow falling into the grass. I shake loose -- as I drift out, leaves die from their branches, touching the white ground like my hands on your skin. Why do I long for this dissolving, this vanishing into something else? Late nights, your body next to mine, I raise my fingers to my face in the dark. They seem to act at the whim of a stranger. Who is this creature who returns after I send myself off into you? I have died into you a thousand times losing myself and then finding again my arms, my legs, the cleft in my chin, the way my cheek dents when I smile.
Opening Up
W Listen
We two do this, sometimes -- strip off what we own until, together, we have nothing left but the bare skin of who we are. I see in your face -- as you lay back naked and open your middle -- a recognition that you will be, somehow, changed when you take me inside you. And I also change -- I know that now, unlike before when I entered you and failed to see I could never again be the same because I too had unfolded. You are a flower and I am a flower opening inside you.
When I have you in hand you puff up with pride, and in my mind I become the naked conqueror -- bold, strong, capable of wrestling any set of uncovered limbs. And though the hair on my head is now thin, I labor as earnestly as a young man until my work with you is complete, and I rest in milky sleep. When I draw near to the body of one I have chosen, you salute her radiance, and when, finally, she accepts my short fingers, my calluses and my words as ornaments of worth, when we have unbound each other so that all of our warts and scars are known, and I have nothing more to offer her, you are the gift I bring. You are the flower that springs from my middle. Foolishly, I follow full of joy as you lead, for we who love women must appear foolish, offering our hairy, muscular, brute bodies. And how lucky we have you to direct us toward their roundness. How lucky when they take us willingly within themselves, for only then can we witness their pleasures, their agonies. You are the root from which the future opens, lying always at the center of this foolishness our fathers have done our children will do again, the women of each generation opening themselves and swelling until they burst, and mothers and fathers seeing their own mouths, their eyes, their hands recreated in their children's bodies.
W ListenThose days I am without you are like walking through a long hall with glass walls knowing those other women are watching, that underneath their clothes they are naked. Forgive me -- I am drawn to their bodies' fragrance, to the moistness of their breath. I fear their voices will lead me away -- their whispers like paper rustling together. But then you -- perhaps because I know so well the folds of your body -- burgeon in my mind like a great fleshy tree. Always, my eyes go back to you, no matter the distraction -- though she roll into my sight, a magnificent wave of muscle and skin. No matter the precise balance of her buttocks, or the delicate curve of her neck, or how her arms seem buoyed by the air like boughs reaching for the light, I will not turn from you. When I lose myself into you, I am never lost. When I'm wrapped in you I have all I desire, even when I'm foolish and think of those others. For through your embrace me all women come to me. Those recognized as beautiful, those who are not recognized -- all are contained within your body.
End