Poems from Below

Under Cover
She rails under the musty quilt, thick with the odor of
Her frozen, swampy sweat , reaches quickly up
With her left hand, grabs deep into her disheveled hair,
And pulls her face down closer to her breasts, chin dug
Sharply into the spot between collar bones, a lovely choke hold.

With her empty right hand, she entwines her fingers high in
The moist fabric of her calico left sleeve and rents her gown,
Parting the sleeve at the shoulder with a satisfying rip.
Then, enraged in every cell, rising, sated finally with hate,
She hurls off her veil of suffocating safety and sits to face
The witch of a day.

Left Knee
I am to myself wondering, to what is, more or less,
The silky, glistening smile at the collision of her
Her left cheek and upper leg, if she notices
Just how delighted I am with the back
Of her left knee, that spot of freckles that makes
Me lust so to nibble, to lick, to tease it gently
From her skin onto my deserving tongue.

I hope not for she will know then
How acutely mad I am for more than
Her sex. It is her atoms, outer rings of electrons,
mingling with my own that I seek to be more than a
Sum, an evoking explosion of molten brainflesh,
Racing through the troughs of our dilated veins.

In desperation to escape myself and fracture away,
I try to touch the first molecule of that freckle with
The first molecule of my rigid tongue and ache
As I linger in near juxtaposition in a dream
Of adjacent. Do her atoms sense and respond?
Do her subatomics jostle mine and cause a mutual ripple?

Can my brain’s life, the swirls of my own
Energy, make its way into her womb and explore
About warm flesh seeking the mysterious
Inner anatomies, the sweet folds, the gentle
Rhythms that course about in that secret boggy
Bottom land, ripe and redolent of lives to be?

Always, I fail, here, to escape the penitentiary of my flesh.
My sad inadequacy lies wholly in misapprehensions of physics.

Inadequate
god no, she says into her pillow. My left knee?
rolling into a half turn, a slow arc exposing
the shadow of her left breast. My left knee? What’s
delightful about a knee especially the back?
i cannot see the back of my knees and feel
most lucky to get all the hair there when I shave.
so what does it matter? Stretching long and back to the pillow:
jeesh, you can be the weirdest at time.
could you just for once come to sleep and quit with all the body
parts?