39: Glimpses

He is a good cook, can always

make something - from nothing and

what is left. For his mother was a baker, owned that shop

at everyone's corner.

He is mellow and limber, my horse

and rider. His ancestors owned the plains; his great grandmother

was raped and by the seventh man they say, became

pregnant; he is bleached out of Wales and Highlands, ocean pearls,

to a thirty-second; my native guide

descends from the stallion and steppe; my Judaean prince,

Germanic refuge, climbs

down from cheekbone towers; high browed he

walks

on my lips, breathes

into me about: a legend -

The ocean is a desert; the surface,

vast; the floor, night's heart, dark

stretched like my body across the long bed desert of

sheets. Everything

is a desert.

Somewhere out in the long desert, where the sun

will take your eyes, there is a parable. A traveler, buried; and a sign,

an arm in the sand; it is sound, white bone. Skin, flesh, bloodied roads long

gone, and

on its wrist is the shadow of time, a wrist watch.

The shadow is as long dead as the desert walk

and in the skeletal hand, a note. Reads:

We will never know how long I waited. How far have you come?

I laugh, giggle my way across the bed, really and

why is everyone always lost in the desert;

and he says where would you rather be lost, a flower;

and I say who can get lost in a flower, just follow

the petal

to the bloom.

He rolls me; his eyes

inside my sound white bone;

his pale arm stabs me;

under my night skin

feels like

whoever

you have been, thank you

for sharing this vessel with me,

my traveler.