1.17.15

jarred like sweet pepper relish

should you balk at beauty,

quiver before white magic,

stutter before the altar

of God whose face no man
has seen, since he cannot

look when he is before Him?

you drank me, mixed with

bourbon and seagrass the color
of our painted eye tomb, without
peeling back the stone lashes
we flog ourselves with now, self-

creating a wound that wont shut.

why would you shut a heart you
yourself opened?

a heart is not a book, to be taken up
again some time during a dolldrum;
bout of illness. a heart is no cold case
forensic teams close on confirming a

hypothesis. and mine is so open yet.

i did not ask to be pawed that night

my leather boards wet from the
excited perspiration of your thumbs
when they handled me at last.

after incantations and curry spice.
before cornstalks and diamondback
caution signs blurred by our MPH.

but when you fondled my petals leant
towards light forever.

new shoots sprang like a wildcat into the night,
carried heat, so unabashed as to be careless,
disturbing tracks of coyotes we heard crying
at dusk before the evening hunt.

by the alligator water you painted my soft
swamp mud with tears you cried in relief
of knowing, that never again wld you pine
or oak one moment longer than you chose.

and you chose everything at once (me!)
undulating there in the folds of your

Greek god nose. 

we determined we would still make love
in hiding, even once you'd married, we'd
carry on, secret lovers. for the sacredness
of marriage could not touch our silly, light
sanctity. uniformed schoolchild heat.

eternal recess climbing out the sandbox

covered in the red clay buried beneath

everyones understanding.

the sun warmed the handles of the steps
leading up to the slide. our warm hands
fondled the atlas on a roadtrip to the divine.

we existed you said, merely in the playgrounds
of each other's imaginations. two-lane
highways flanked by perched hawks and
osprey feeding in private, on either side.

i could not have imagined this, what awning.

being suddenly naked before you, jarred
like her sweet pepper relish; starting
on a shelf. afraid the tears you cried into
the ripped hem of my peach linen dress,

what you moaned into my shoulders, those
not-words, you cried in relief having realized 

you'd not pine again this life so long as our thick 

forest boreal light show thinned by morning,
o and it always did. it thinned like the mass

in our stomachs like by a heat doesnt matter.