Sky full of stars you can’t see with the day
flourishing its green night-light walking stick,
swollen agony with each step taken
along the river that ends faraway
from here, stone bench or Adirondack chair:
If I were the mountain goat in my dreams
of zodiac birthday flesh, come year's end
it will have been thirty around the trees
since the screams were silenced then forgotten
together in sleep near enough to touch.
Hobble downtown and back. Stay on the grass.
I wish I could kiss you and feel your breasts
against me and you could feel me in turn.
Will we ever? How many years remain?
I don’t know the Big Dipper, Milky Way,
or Orion from your biography.
You are my single exception to life
always having reasons, no matter what
sleep says, waking throws up before the fall,
the cushion of grass, the root-sod of thought.
You know very well where I will go next.
She still sleeps at midday in her back room.
She comes to the door in lace kimono.
She smiles and you know where I go with her.
She prepares a body gently and slakes
her fill, giving always more than she takes.
I say I no longer have the horses
arriving on shore in the salt sea spray,
their hooves leaving no evidence in sand
that here, Adore, is Mississippi mud.
And what happened to your hunchback lover
whose cock like his back curved a questionmark?
Are you that much closer to your own death,
darling mother-lover of mine, Adore
named for the way a family loved you,
a kind of father-son menage a trois
whose sire sleeps underground. You were his best
reason to live. I heard you call, Come back,
your dark body all the light I could see . . .
If you love me I don’t want to be home.
(18 June 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
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