Versione Italiana | Nota biografica | Versione lettura |
I could lie against you
mouth on forehead
limbs woven
into a knot too dense
for yearning, hearing the gossamer flurry
of your breath, the wild nearness
of your heartbeat, and it still won’t be
close enough
I could swallow you
feel the slurry of you
against palate
-- and throat
ravish you
with the rip, snarl
and grind of canine
and molar, taste the ancestral grape
that mothered you, your purpleness
swirling down my gullet,
and it would be a kind
of knowing,
but you still wouldn’t be
me enough
I’m learning, love,
still learning
that there’s more to desire
than this quickening
this tribal shudder
in the loins.
But I’m not sure
I’m ready
for it yet -
that shock
in your daily kabuki
of shape and event.
Not yet.
Not yet
that shock
of vacancy.
Perhaps I will tire
of your grammar,
find myself yearning
for the rumble of verb or the soft
flesh of pure vowel
on those mornings when I stumble
over your landscape
of unforgiving nouns
and it’s possible I will whittle away
the very ribcage
in which I once sought sanctuary
gnaw at the unbending sinew
of ancestral norm
sulk
turn sophomoric
say fuck you
say cope up
just to disrupt
your family symmetries
your patrician DNA
Maybe I will simply
want something more
one day
than your bequest of semicolons
something more final
more silent
But even if I turn the page
before you do,
know I am as
dog-eared,
soiled,
puzzled,
as you are
and as much in love.
I renounced shape
a long time ago
chose
bagginess
endless
recess-
ivity
but there are days
when the longing
returns
and I cannot abide
the sterile cynicism
of the Anti-Couples club
the smug peddlers
of Uni-sole Advaita
I know it means
the saga of
two old shoes
all over again
their grubby leather unions,
tales of childhood,
prejudice, toe jam, politics,
laces in a perpetual snarl
of knots,
footprints
footprints.
But some days
I’m idolater enough
to want it again:
that old charade,
otherness