The season's leaves half over at their peak as we drive down the hill. Or else we have no darkness, no sentence to begin with -- marriage an engine full of mileage while lovers wander naked through the woods with Polaroids, close-ups of their faces emerging from dark squares like Eurydice just before Orpheus turned to look -- which is why I ask you to take me from the rear, one hand choking my neck with a silk scarf, the other clamping down on my hip as you ride up and down so hard on a motel bed our bodies enter myth. And for the first time in years I model for the charcoal lines you draw, holding myself more still than breath allows -- and what shame there ever was comes rushing back to inhabit whatever form we can give to it. Let me chariot your bones into the sun that crimsons every leaf caught under these crude wheels -- a coarse rope taut against the harness of delight, your muscled flanks that pull desire's thread through the needle's eye -- Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.cc.press.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE INCOGNITA OF RAPHAEL by WILLIAM ALLEN BUTLER ULYSSES AND THE SIREN by SAMUEL DANIEL THE WARNING by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW HERTHA by ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE INVITATION by JOHANNA AMBROSIUS MR. PETER'S STORY: THE BAGMAN'S DOG by RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM SONNET TO A FRIEND, ON HIS SECOND MARRIAGE by BERNARD BARTON |