To You

If I can say a word that stands for love
I will. The night is swallowing the day,
an act of homage (humans call loving).
There are these bodies that need attending.

Praise your mind that imagines my body
Praise your body my mind can enter
If there is a word for oasis
your name evokes the smell of water
and drop by drop your lips with their resin
kissing the tree concealed by shadows
with their rays of light jarring the darkness
If you tell me what the word for home
means in your fingers (another word for love)
devotion is nothing like what it is

in action. The night is giving back
to day what it loved. There is that word love
one time too many, the walls of letters
falling away to show how bodies move.

Look at the phases of the moon break up
Give what you can to the sound of the sea
too far away but for memory’s conch
whose soft roar is the tide a body loves

and once there the day gives back to the night
all that never arrived until now (love)
though I never speak of the moon
and you never say the sun’s name.

Age riddles bodies still kissed in their sleep
How long will it be before I touch you

(26 March 2011)

copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander