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.
