J.Burke

From The Heart’s Lush Gardens

Before skin : eyes :

shy : brown : dreaming timid under lashes :
thieving : stealing sideways glances :

so many little thefts :
at face : at hair : at freckles : at neck :

at hands : at fingers :
at curve and swell beneath dress :

beneath white blouse : beneath : beneath.
*
Skin : what is your testimony?

Whose fugitive hands : long gone :
stroked you : coaxed :

a wanted : unwanted :
wanted : unwanted :

shiver : tremble : quiver : quicksilver :
while you were dreaming : fledgling dreams :

dreaming other : dreaming girl hands?
What is your memory?

Who touched you here : and here?
Who raised his hairy knee :

between your bare legs :
in an empty change room :

whilst others danced The Wedding Dance?
Who arranged to meet you :

during a school lunch break :
furtive amidst the trees and thickets :

the rocks and sculptured ponds :
of the Veale Gardens?

Who lay beside you in the long grass : whispering?
What secrets : have you kept all these years :

what imprints : what scars?
*
Later : I threw away his letters :
the childish rounded script :

something given : something taken away :

Whether from anger : or shame :
I cannot say: the only letters discarded.
*
She lay beneath me : still as a fallen bird :

I was skinbone : stripling : sapling :
lowering my mouth to : her mouth :

my lips to : her lips :
to the soundtrack of Carole King’s Tapestry :

and she : white bloused : golden-haired :
beneath me : still as a fallen bird :

When our lips touched : she didn’t resist :
didn’t respond : and my kiss :

faltered : foundered :
fell between us : still as a fallen bird :

that did not breathe again.
*

We danced : my hands :

(do I imagine this?) : on her white-bloused waist :
round and round : circling : never arriving :

the moments distanced : silent :
the recovered footage of a lost movie :

girl from another land : girl from another world :
girl template : temple of my longing :

girl never found : long lost : girl never known :
How could she know of my longing :

when it was a bone not yet unearthed?
*
If I dream of her now :

I enter the dream I had of her then :
insolence gleaming in her eyes :

at the corners of her fourteen-year-old mouth :
I enter the dream of my heart :

its adolescent pounding :
the dream of my novice lips :

in their timid uncertainty.
*
To fully apprehend a moment :

a singular moment in a vast plurality :
pluck it from obscurity :

and hold it : for a lifetime : with tenderness :
with the concentrated gaze : of the senses :

until its petals open : delicate : flush with colour :
as with : the thirty seven years :

since : the still life : of my fallen kiss.
*
With or without skin :

on skin : against skin : inside skin :
touching : pressing : filling : squeezing : caressing :

imagination partakes : helps itself :
to the fruits of eros : the imagined touch :

the imagined lovemaking : thrust and moan of it :
feel and sound of it : body to body :

spooned : astride : entwined :
sweat and breath : hunger : compulsion :

weight of cupped breasts : tongue’s soft questing :
on nipple : on furrowed skin :

between : between :
moistness on moistness :

her raised bud : my dripping chin :
hunting sighs : hunting shudders :

abdomen’s involuntary contraction :
pungent smell of it : tongued bitterness :

tongued nectar of it :
fingers on glans : on shaft : on testicles :

entering and : entering:
blurred thought of it :

want and want of it : tensed muscles :
arched back : thrust and moan of it :

fullness of it : hope in it :
promise of it : release from it :

transitory release from it.
*
At my very heart :

(in its rhythmic beat :
axiom : gravity well : lightning rod : leitmotif :

the chamber music of love :
call it ventricular love : call it aortic love) :

is the dream of a woman :
a woman with many faces : many bodies :

known : and unknown :
a woman never displaced : by circumstance :

Always there : in the years of solitude :
the years of living alone :

the years between lovers :
and whilst there were lovers :

and in the midst of a marriage :
the dream of a woman :

same dream : different dream :
dream of being accepted :

dream of being received :
with open arms : with open heart :

with love : with ferocity : uncompromised dream :
that no woman can match :

from which I must : always wake.
*
Meet me here :

where the wilderness of the unspoken :
meets the wilderness of the spoken :

where mirages shimmer in the distance :
in the fierce heat :

I am tired of sifting : my heart’s rumpled
pornography : I am tired of trying : to articulate :

Meet me here : and fill my ears :
with sweet nothings : show me :

the ripe body of your lust :
Bring to me : your willingness :

your questing hands : your needing lips :
Bring to me : the sly curve of your mouth :

dancing devils in your eyes :
your unappeased heart :

Bring to me : your naked loveliness :
your unasked questions : your hot wet urgency :

Take from me : the fire from my furnace :
my quiet incantations : my un-beached poems :

Come to me : unguarded : vulnerable :
heart and body open :

Meet me here now :
before night’s sharp cold arrives :

and let us fuse : in the heat of this wilderness.