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Nocturnes: At Thirteen Milller Court
The memory is like violins in chamber music.
Her boots, and most of her clothes covered mine on the floor.
The softness and warmth, the delicatest friction,
of her sheer white stockings transcended even imagined fiction.
Her otherwise nakedness enfolded me, a comfort
against November's pervasive, damp chills.
Before I knew her, this life had always been
slanted, gray, prospects of November's insidious chills.
Now each kiss scattered the sky's clotted clouds
revealing the stars: thank God, the same ancient stars.
And their celestial motion, east to west,
seemed to become invited and propelled
by our bodies' playful, gentle, choreographed collisions---
back and forth, up and down, side to side:
the right ascension and declination not only
of pillows' and sheets' disarray, and the bed's dimensions,
but of the constellated glory outside and above.
Starward
