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Description
*
The blue mail-satchel bumps and sways, brings them in,
rigid with the weight of promise;

envelopes, dessert-colored, a delicacy,
the brittle folds filled with scent,
a creme transfer over time, to me.

I open each with the reverence
of seashells and oceanic loves.

I cut apart the shore that separates us
with a letter-opener, the sound of water.

You have arrived
before your body.

I settle into my pulse
and the resounding ambiance of my privacy
while your words touch my lips.
*

I.
We stand in our reamed maze of consent--
faces, throats thrumming
on parallel shoulders;

a doorway, at dusk;
a barefoot dance sung over by birds.

We are two of the same one;
the twin elements of time:
now and Then
--before and after--
not opposed. Of the same origin,
a substance pared from itself.

II.
The dawn is your precision.
The long hair of rain,
the history of sound. You stand,
hands over your heart, eyelids like mourning veils
as the clouds close in and then disperse
over your head.

The sun cut through the windows
as you arrived, ethereal, over vastness;

a clarity emerges
with the quick ribbon-script
of what you say.

A green and glassy seed of meaning
unhinges its sprout
and ascends, terse,
watery, understood by the soil,
its roots
between your words.

You elaborate with your self,
on the movement
of song.

III.
Your laughter
is a tangled cordage of light
in my eyes;

the liquidity of your dance
drowns me.

A ginger joy, the presence
I anticipate, the raucous noise
of living an old love that follows.

A resemblance of hands and eyes,
the voices thick with similarity.

We are the foliage in a play,
minor and careless.
We claim ourselves
with our delicious hilarity,
our theatrical gestures,
for our own sake.

*
He has left to resume his circuit with his satchel,
his square truck
full of baskets,
his tan smell of wind and paper.

The afternoon resumes
surrounded with envelopes gutted
like empty ice-cream bowls;
surrounded by the gift of tangible contact,

surrounded by the sultry, rainy tang
of time well spent,
full of its own rewards.