The Bower

for Cynara

Your body has been perfumed
and calls to me in this collapsed air.

On the hour, each argued hour,
birds rise to sink into song.
They know my motives
and their starling sky bends
as I bend to meet your
raised hips in battle
among these fiction sheets.

Beneath your caramel kiss,
your kisses like songs,
your heat music, I find

There is a softness to our lust
I must penetrate.
But you are not built for that.

With vague terror
I see your eyes, your poverty skin,
poverty in the air we breathe,
as I come
in and out of time, my hips shaking
while your hand clenches inside me
flashing signs,

That I must hold
onto everything,
or the absence,
like poverty,
like beauty,
like terror.