Blue Willow Moon

my darling, in a love so narcotic

I possessed unimpaired splendour

having no other want or wish

not as memory, but like a gift

from forgetfulness,

as a desire can wake you.”

for words to stir from the silences they keep?

Love is the ground note; we cannot do

without it or the sorrow of its changes.

on hay-flecked hair

doves flutter too

in the darkness of a porch

that suddenly

would surround us,

enrapture us, in the burning flurry of

breaths, and heartbeats,

and stolen smiles.”

we lie in the lavender silence

and feel the blood slip

through our arteries and veins,

sliding through the capillaries, thin as

root hairs, bringing bliss to the most

remote outposts of our bodies, delivering

oxygen and proteins, minerals, all the rich

chemicals our cells crave and devour

as we have devoured each other, I

lie there as sound reasserts itself,

and listen to the soft ticking of the clock

and a foghorn, faint from the lighthouse,

a car door slams across the street,

and I want to say something to you,

but it’s like trying to tell a dream,

when the words come out flat as

handkerchiefs under the iron and the listener

smiles pleasantly like a person who doesn’t speak

the language and nods at everything.

It should be enough that we have

lived these hours, breathing

each other’s breath, catching it like

wind in the sails of our bodies.

It should be enough. And yet

I carry the need for speech, strung

on the filaments of my DNA like black pearls,

from the earliest times when

our ancestors must have lain still,

like us, in amazement

and groped for the first words.”