The Caress

I come to us. What is the closest thing,
about which trumpets rave and poets sing,
and kings go mad? For us this “everything”
is our caress.

There is a pitch of night when one discards
the clothes of day . . . its phantoms and charades,
hours, tasks, friends, journeys – topple down like cards
in nothingness.

I come to us, to those mysterious lands
where thoughts, adrift, can turn like drifting sands
through the bottleneck of time: but still through hands
is our caress.

Through hands, and arms, and certainty. Go in
to where the breaths of nature all begin,
the joy of simple closeness, skin to skin –
the flooding ‘Yes’.

I come to us, to those bone-sensitive
demands: to take, to have, to hoard. To give,
to freely give – the sweet imperative
in our caress.

There is an ‘is’ that finely follows ‘must’,
there is a unison comes after lust.
There is a sound of breathing that means trust.
The quietness

(I come to us) of travelling in one place,
of letting all go by, while at one pace
our galaxy spins on – a minor grace
it is, that brought together time and place
in our caress.