The Pearl

You have gazed my morning–tousled hair,

and kissed its softness.

You have lent your pillow to my dreaming,

your bed – to my slumber.


You have had me.


I had read love, in arms of day

  and eyes of night :


It was mis–taken.


That words escape my mouth – I cannot reason.

Perhaps,

it is that I am needing –

bound hand and foot, as I am,

to memories of flesh,

and conversation,

and dreaming love,

and your kiss.


Birthed with each aging kiss

– a moment –

perpetuating memory

– myth that spawned creation;

– a breath –

that made my heart flutter –

now sumptuous –

in fabrication, could wing the Gods!


Seeming imminent : its closeness,

and its gift?

Life.


Now, to each night –

I sit beneath my window.


To feel my hair stroked by a breeze –

To see the clouds caressed by the wind –

To hear the groaning melody swirl

through my bedroom air –



and I am brought to memory

of how it feels

to breathe with you.


Once,

that I was made dizzy

just by a sip of your breath

as to a thousand sips of wine

and there !

lay Cleopatra’s pearl :


it was the eye,


that watched as I bent to kiss you,

the eye that watched,

as we made love.


But I have not loved near so long

as I’ve had breath.

For I have breathed a lifetime,

and breath I still.


But breathe I now alone.


Where lay the boy I fashioned as a God?

The God I sculpted from a

mound of man and lips,

with sweat, and what be love?


Where plays my muse?

takes he the pearl, the kiss and leave me be?

Where plays my muse?


Now that he will not

play with me.