Here, you began
in a small sea, cushioned,
preferential, never suspecting
some other music
besides this heart.

My thighs
scissored you through
turquoise splendor
on the August afternoons.
Your eyes were suggestions;
your arms, buds;
your penis a shoot,
barely splitting its seed.

Your father was the thunder
that made you quiver,
sped your pulse,
made your pale heels
discern the inner reaches
of your universe.

He pushed into me for you,
groped the stretched dune of belly
for buttock, head,
fist, knee. I'd whisper
careful, careful.
When you first met desire
it was so swirled with fear
you may never recover.

When I kissed you, salamander,
boy spackled with
blood and grease, smelling
of water-weeds, I remembered
the swamp below my lungs.
The place you lived with
me, alone.



Dusk, I-95

Trucks are
missionaries of
distance
rimmed with
golden lights.
Who hasn't longed
to strip down to bone,
pull up into the high
cab with an indifferent
stranger, headed
anyplace you
would not be known?
In their wake,
the roadside grasses
stagger, small cars
waver in their
trivial journeys home.
We live our worried lives.
The big trucks go thundering
through the night
red-eyed with rage
and purpose,
tanked up with potential
flame and the explosive
power of someplace else,
anywhere there is to be
four hundred miles from here
by morning.



In Mid-Summer

In mid-summer the turtles would stage
their silent siege, heads like
dried prunes just beyond the razor-weed
at the dock's edge. When a moccasin zipped
across the green-black they'd duck, dive
down to cool safety in the feathery underwater garden,
the slick, loamy muck. The grown-up
on lookout would holler "snake," and we'd
shoot out of the lake with silt clinging to each
soft hair of our arms, our legs pumping,
churning, up through the water-oaks on the
sand hills, up to the screen porch where we'd
shudder and pant.
The rest of the afternoon we'd play cards,
gin rummy on the cold, sandy cement floor
which bore the imprint of oak leaves
a curled centipede and a cat's paw.
Mornings, my brother would bang on the bottom of each
upturned boat with a peeling oar. Sometimes,
a shadow dark and slim would skid out, race across the
sand to the low fringe of scrub.
Other mornings, there was just the dreadful sanskrit
of their passing on the white powder, and the
dare to be the first one in the water.