Love Poem

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You stand by your car, man in meadow

                   now deep white — slow teeth, slow ice.

                                                                              Fallow-night footprints

                                                                    follow through stiff with each crunch in the snow.

                                       Frost crystals on my tongue.

Your cheek bone cold against my face,

         a whirring rock bone deep.

−

I open the word and crawl inside its spine, barbed wire, turbine

                   with dark belly, coil hierarchy.

What word, you ask. Your body a cloud flattened in my hand.

                                      Your body coiled with mine. Air moves as snake

         over ribcage, cracks into powder.

I say thorn. I say mouth.

−

Desire is criminal. You being here is criminal.

         You sip from the delta near my tongue. Bone river

deepens at the clavicle.

Eyes stutter open. Limbs crepuscular over the bedframe.

I watch you shower after.

                                      Tributaries, confluence, mineral stains.

                   You rub the holy off your skin. Your fingers

in after-soap jaw white.

−

Bent wasp hums behind your throat. In the iris,

orange whispers into deep yellow slather.

                                                          Uranium corrodes to spalling black,

speckles on hyoid horn. Your shoulder blades gawk open, wings sylphlike.

                   Torso woven with sweat chalks down to bone.

                                                                    Skin can be too loud sometimes.

−

You have the night’s bristle — yolk noose from penumbra

I lick the railroad down your back —

                                                admire black water in your hair.

                                                Before you go,

                           I swallow frozen sand.

I say you can go now, you can go now.