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If They Would Call It Passion
(Post coitum omne animal triste)*
You hold me with the look of your fire; the softness of your breath-hands touch
things inside, things that by your touch move only like Swiss cogs in their perfection
In my hand from my heart are open and raw poppies, the explosions of their eyes – oh I feel
Their tears when I am on the cross; nailed by passion for only you, my seraph, to see
and then I see too, see the iridescence in you when the heart of your fingers opens me
gently petal by petal; this rose aches in your zephyr’s embrace
And once let go – like butterflies to the blue – I can but only watch
And trace the way your hair is so still and still on my lip long after you’ve left
I am left only with shadows and pillow-prints; and when they weep, it is for me
And me alone, drawn to coil around and inside a cuttingly lonely truth:
That I am not sure I want to know anymore; though will you still accept it? Will you:
Sip from me, my hummingbird? The blueness of my sight and its stream of sighs?
Perhaps even The Cursed Gift? Somewhere selflessness even flocked afar
And even my colours once radiant now feel the sting of all my dissolutions and scar my back
A remembrance of the heaving and fall into the Sea Of Tranquility, though its silverness still astounds
when nestling somewhere far into your voice, filling nights like wells
Your sequined eyes grasped from our night still shine in me
But now, a scratch at my walls, my skin cries out between your nails and water, blisters
shut me and pool at my feet, A reflection, of me, of us, of your ghost –
a caul of smoke in the moonlight and a laceration that can never ever heal.
*{Latin}(After coition every animal is sad)
2004
