Suitor’s Dream
For you, I’ll explain the dream: lemons turning away from green— bright cargo and heavy; they fall, they unhinge, they sail like a hundred swift ships sack and burn then say goodbye. For you, I’m through with need—last, enough, no more. Except we’re never without that song. A clique of flies core to center. Sweetness as sweetness does in our body hides under sharp white ribs. A singing of tongues, so many I lose count. ––– I count; I remember a singing of tongues. Their hum. Flies circling a mason jar. Lamb’s ear heat. Voiceless breath— open, cover, confess; this wanting and the mouth it carries across flesh. Little ship of hunger. I’m rapt as a child hiding in leaves, reading reds and yellows, new roof and walls luxuries of a home made of storms, of rivers, of droughts. He pretends to be swallowed. He is. ––– We’re not inside a whale or cormorant. We don’t live in tin drums of any belly, hull or hell, where it’s hard to tell dark from dark. The problem is light— a new kind of blind— my hands turn touch to sight and like waking see shape before color luck before fate. And the mind, heartbeat slow, awake, turns a day into might. ––– You might with touch fill the sailcloth of my neck, keel to nest and launch to sea, to island, to palm, to sand bleached as bone this body of possibility: our life away from life. Think shipwreck. Think crash and shore, deck timbers we gather to burn, and, without rescue, live. ––– Let’s live upstate, spell ourselves in ice. In a quiet village aproned owners salt a path to their door. Pines send snow below. White breath, white room. If I think of sea, tremolo and trade the sunstroke waves light as lemons I’ll say nothing. I’m anchor and joy. ––– I fear no anchor inked to arm or neck when I undress; no double barbs of stay and stay, flesh never transparent as a house without walls. Each body lives a hundred lives and is silent about where it sleeps. ––– We sleep. We live. We go back to the root of desire— from the stars— as we could lash light to skin, and bear it. For you this dream.