Lucia
My hair, voluminous from sleeping in
six different positions, redolent with your scent,
helps me recall that last night was indeed real,
that it’s possible for a bedspread to spawn
a watershed in the membrane that keeps us
shut in our own skins, mute without pleasure,
that I didn’t just dream you into being.
You fit like a fig in the thick of my tongue,
give my hands their one true purpose,
find in my shoulder a groove for your head.
In a clinch, you’re clenched and I’m pinched,
we’re spooned, forked, wrenched, lynched
in a chestnut by a mob of our own making,
only to be resurrected to stage several revivals
that arise from slightest touch to thwart
deep sleep with necessities I never knew
I knew until meeting you a few days
or many distant, voluptuous lifetimes ago.
First appeared in No Tell Motel; Reprinted in The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present, edited by David Lehman (Scribner, 2008); Forthcoming in Voluptuous Bristle (Finishing Line, 2010).