Notes I
Your silky mouth, your sulky simmering mouth
Covered in kisses while you sleep belly-up
In that thick bag of sleep —

Sometimes you rise and wake to wash bedspreads,
Leave our love-bed, our bed heads, our bed of dark night thread.
You’re suspended alone with your celluloid dreams,
The blue couch, the cat house, the Hollywood queens.

Would you prefer some hothouse flower? All breasts and
Bare-legged, meaty women with hair that curls and unfurls
In your fingertips, the obscene flesh, the flash of her primitive
Sex, languid and unfolding in the lamplight.

Instead you find an electric crack, cut ribbon and
Clipped stems, eyes upturned and alert —
Stepping into the kitchen, handing you my raw dish,
The cup of tea.

Notes II
(Your) taste, an electric touch tender

Quiver – Swoon! Collapsing kisses
Spills of split skin, slick tissue –
My tongue, the dumbstruck smile!

How softly we sleep! Our bodies in bloom,
Uncoiled and safe in the sun. 

Notes III
You offer paradise over perfection, no empty eternity
But the soft light of your bedroom, orange blossoms
And tangerine-air, the holiness of animal prayer,
My mouth on your mouth with my hands in your hair,
Skin-starched and stretched across the sheets,
Like spring – asleep in some flowering darkness. 

Notes IV
What is this penance? These kisses, like prayer –
like holiness without cutting off your hands.

The heat of your body, that warm wound wrapping itself
around my body, our body, the sleeping breathing body, the soft
sensual body, spilling and circling like some soft undressing.

Where is your wound, soft-mouthed and resounding
like a bruised fruit you hold in your hands while
you find something else to feed.

Intimacy as an unspooling.

Finding tenderness in the dark, turning away
from some untouchable violence.