Storm, storm.
From the waist down, at least nothing unfamiliar.
Cypress trees, the catalpa, its seed pods
hanging like shadow icicles, and the light around them,
and the bodies that enter the light and leave it.
Your own among them, but as when the body seems
most to want impossibly to step free of itself--
oblivion of wish, of wishing about sanctuary,
how over time it makes the birds come closer, how that's
different from trust, isn't it?
"What the fuck do you think you're looking at?"
He says softly.
What a thing to say.
The mind protecting itself by shutting down
an intimacy that most likely won't be returned.
Won't expect it, as if that were the mind's chief purpose,
to resist a fall, though, falling
is what the body does best.
It's quick to rise for moving toward you with all
the ceremony of many wings at once out spread.
A holiday descending.
The dark adjusts itself, settles its wings inside you.
The shadows that strut the dark open and fold like hope,
a paper fan, violence in its pitch,
and fall like waves above them, the usual sea birds,
the presumable indifference to chance.
Its blond convergences.
As when telling cruelty apart from chivalry
can come to seem irrelevant or not anymore the main point.
He touches himself here and here.
Directive.
Turns its face away.
It can look like ransom.
Now, it looks like privilege, now recklessness, now
triumph, gravel and blood, humiliation, lovely.
Now, strict refrain.
He taketh my hand in his.