Isn’t affection a knife we hold sweetly to our throats?

Isn’t the night a shovel that digs and turns

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up every layer of the moon between our eyes?

You stab my belly and darkness bleeds fondly

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out of me. The edges of our years poniarded

by memories, pillows in their blades of quarrels,

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two-crossed room scissoring the history

we once sprouted out of here. I bottle our memory

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in a gourd of distance. In the vine of the night,

I uncork a hundred strides out of my limbs

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to find you. You’re stoppered by trees, by oceans,

by the bottlecap of a continent. You’re corneous

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like the beak of a cloud pecking the ground like rain.

Thrust a sword of whispering down the lawn,

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let my ears grip it by its hilt, let a word tilt

itself like a weapon, let its blade mow and tow

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the ire of grasses we still grow. If you slate

your presence before dusk, the sun would strum

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the edges on the schedules of your breath.

But I need you like a belch, like a belly slicing

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its hill of hereness to a valley of want. I want

you like a scratch, rubbing my skin with the feather

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-edge of your elbow. Shear the mangroves

of my fears from top to root, from twig to you,

 

knifing through the torso of the night into a body

bulging swimmingly out of dawn.